With just about any kind of speciality, you spend time developing your specialized knowledge and you learn to speak the language surrounding it as part of a fac

With just about any kind of speciality, you spend time developing your specialized knowledge and you learn to speak the language surrounding it as part of a facility for concisely navigating (hopefully) precisely in (potentially) complex web of ideas. When you interface with non-specialists, you can't rely on the shared specialized vocabulary. This means you have to do a lot of work to distill which insights are key and figure out how to communicate them (along with supporting ideas) to an audience whose highest insight resolution is going to be varying and who may each bring their own language to the table. So on top of building your problem domain model, you're going to have to build a model of how the people you're working with can understand it. And you will have to do this over and over. You can be snobby about that, and say that it's soooo hard being so much smarter in your specialized field than non-specialists are, but you don't have to be snobby to realize that this is a dimension of the work that you might not enjoy or may even not be cut out for. And of course, you don't have to be a mathematician to have experienced this. It's certainly sufficient, but not necessary. If you've been a developer in a company that has non-dev coworkers and you've never hit this turbulent boundary, you've either been remarkably well insulated, or you're so remarkably natural at that kind of job that you definitely should be doing it. :)