[nmcfarl]

This is not always possible.

At my first job I built a system to track charitable donations by local bank branches for the banks lawyers. I couldn't even understand most of the status drop downs I built as they were just line numbers in IRS forms (eg 1040 13b). The PM on the project was barely doing any better.

But when we were done the lawyers all agreed that it was 1000 times better than the Excel spreadsheet that the lawyers themselves had built and were passing around between offices.

Would it have turned out better if I'd been a tax attorney before taking on the gig, I'm sure. But you can still get results without the deep domain knowledge residing in the programmer's head.