Well it certainly drives me nuts from the other side as well. Perhaps the best skill I walked away from liberal arts school with is to listen to a roomful of people over the course of 90 minutes, understand their individual arguments and find consensus or points of disagreement that need to be further hashed out. At work, no matter where I've worked, the big issue I see over and over is people talk a great deal but fail to listen to each other. A roomful of people doesn't always have to agree, but it kills me how many times I've seen disagreement at work take the form of "we'll all keep doing our jobs the way we individually define them without really discussing that it doesn't give our product a cohesive direction." I'm biased but I believe this is at least in part because college education for most people lacks students engaging each other's ideas.
