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

A programmer does not need domain knowledge. A *good*, well-rounded programmer should have the ability to interpret domain-specific requirements and obtain domain knowledge to solve problems, but in my opinion should promptly forget that information.

You have a choice - do you want to be a subject matter expert, or a technical expert? 

If you want to work at one company, or stick to a specific industry, then gather that domain knowledge and climb the rungs. You'll soon shift from being a programmer to being someone who works with the rest of the business, liasing between management / marketing (who have business requirements) and the technical team (who just know how to translate technical problems into code). You'll be the guy who sees the requirements document and thinks "Hey, they forgot about scenario X when the moon is in the seventh house and Jupiter aligns with Mars". You are a **subject matter expert**.

If you want to have core technical skills, you avoid domain knowledge and keep growing your technical skills. This doesn't mean you should be belligerent and refuse to learn. It just means that gathering this knowledge is not your core focus. There are enough technical challenges in software engineering without focusing on business knowledge if you choose to pursue them. Become a solution architect; drive your organisations technical capabilities. You are a **technical expert**.

It's a legitimate choice. I choose technical expert every time. It means I can work anywhere, and never be sidetracked into work I don't want to do.
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.