Yes, you could say that about every field, but for some reason people like to apply it to some fields that are viewed as sterile without some other domain knowl

Yes, you could say that about every field, but for some reason people like to apply it to some fields that are viewed as sterile without some other domain knowledge. I think this situation speaks to the relative power of various professions. Shouldn't accountants for tech companies understand deeply the nature of software development, in order to avoid being bean counters and support innovation properly? Shouldn't doctors know about the professions of their patients, in order to recommend effective lifestyle changes to improve their health? And so on. And yet, no one claims that doctors or accountants are deficient without domain knowledge of other fields. So I think it's weird to think that software engineers or writers are somehow incomplete unless they also have training in other so called "real" domains. You pick up the domain knowledge naturally as you work on specific projects if you have the needed curiosity to do your work well. Software engineers are masters of their own domain: how abstract information is manipulated, and can apply this skill to any domain when necessary.