Software Developers: do you think vertical industry expertise is important to your career?

During an interesting session at an IBM Software Group briefing last week Alice Chou, Director, IBM developerWorks ISV & Developer Relations, took us through some data that IBM had obtained through a survey about developer opinions – it turns out the vast majority of developers, (upwards of 80% if memory serves me right) polled said vertical industry experience was indeed important to them. Ah here we go:

Responses to the question, “Outside of your technical, IT expertise, do you find that domain knowledge of the industry you work in is ____.”

I wondered if the poll might suffer from some sample bias- after all, many developers are horizontal tech-focused thinkers, which is not to detract from their value. So I thought I would ask twitter. I was seeking some colour, rather than the numbers, and I definitely got it.

I particularly liked this from @garethr:

“Yes, but mainly in the sense of taking something that a specific vertical is good at, then applying it to a different vertical”. nice!

Sadly state of the art in curation tools for this kind of thing are kind are poor. I tried bit.ly bundles, which worked ok, but made it hard to bring the conversation back here to my blog. I wonder if integration through disqus on bit.ly and redmonk.com might work. Anyway- why not take a look at the answers… they were really excellent, frankly. and if you have any thoughts of your own please post them as comments on this blog. I am sure someone will tell me I should have asked on Quora… 😉

So Software Developers: do you think vertical industry expertise is important to your career?

Also worth noting I asked a slightly different question….