Question: > 
> **Possible Duplicate:**  
> 
> [How important is Domain knowledge vs. Technical knowledge?](https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/51268/how-important-is-domain-knowledge-vs-technical-knowledge) 
> 
> 
> 

I often hear from my colleagues and sometimes from interviewers that,

> 
> "There is nothing so great in having excellent programming knowledge.
>  One must gain the domain knowledge as the 1st priority. If you have a
>  good domain knowledge, then writing code for that is not a big deal."
> 
> 
> 

(Here domain knowledge is something related to area you are working in. For example, I work in telecom domain, someone might be in Finance or Pharma or Web development or Embedded and so on.)

I disagree with above passage and think exactly opposite. In my career *till now*, I have seldom missed any deadline for bugfix or feature enhancement. I have kept changing the domains (within telecom) but stuck with learning the programming techniques. Though I might be wrong.

**Questions**:

* Is my current approach correct ?
* Given a choice between domain or programming (with limited time)
which one should be chosen ?
* Is there a good future for a person, who is primarily a very good
coder but not so great in a domain (of course initially) ?

I ask this because, I feel that every domain ultimately boil down to code sea in which one has to dive!

Answer: 
One could even *define* programming as "mapping domain knowledge to code", so obviously mastering both the domain and coding is mandatory. You have to dive in the code sea, yes, but it's not enough. How could you write the program without knowing what the program is supposed to do? Or, if you know what your program should do, how could you write it if you can't code?

In many cases, the programmer has to know the domain even in more detail than some plain "domain specialist", because the specialist can solve all kind of exceptions and corner cases with his common sense and experience as they turn up, but the programmer has to explicitly handle all those details in the code, before they turn up.

> 
> Given a choice between domain or programming (with limited time) which one should be chosen?
> 
> 
> 

At any given moment, the best bet is to improve your weakest point. And, there are easier and harder domains. If you're making mobile phone toy games, then the domain is probably not that hard; the harder part is making the program efficient, portable, good-looking, etc. But if you're making nuclear power plant control program, then it may take years of intensive study to actually master the nuclear physics that your program has to deal with.

> 
> Is there a good future for a person, who is primarily a very good coder but not so great in a domain?
> 
> 
> 

You can approach total mastery from either direction, but in the end, you have to master both coding and the domain.
Domain knowledge is good but this is not the responsibility of the programmer. It is the responsibility of business analyst, systems analyst, data modeler, software testers, software architects and sometimes the project manager. Each of these categories require different level of domain knowledge.

The programmer is not supposed to gather or formulate requirements. He/she is supposed to understand requirements and implement these requirements, at least that is in the case in large institutions.

The reason for my argument is that business domain knowledge includes business functions, laws, regulations, interface policies with other businesses, business agreement between organizations, and lots of other details never discussed with developers. Also, programming is not a light skill to acquire and maintain. For example, You can't expect someone to know banking compliance rules, regulations, and OOP. 

Nevertheless, a programmer who has worked in a bank for 10 years, would indeed know about banking products and banking system architecture more than a programmer who works for a Telco. This knowledge, makes that programmer more appealing to banking jobs, specially if the new environment uses the same software as the the job seeker environment (for example, same CRM or Credit Card Processing application). In oil companies in Canada, specifically, they usually ask for Oil & Gas expertise from developers - I never been able to justify that.

Domain knowledge allow a programmer to move to other careers if he/she so wishes but defining and documenting domain knowledge is not obvious without a certification, courses or a degree.

In my opinion, the core and foremost important qualification of a programmer should be the technical knowledge in his specialty stack.