It just happens that two of my good friends are carpenters. And they are highly aware of the business. They have to be in order to ensure they have work as construction and remodeling and other types of work ebb and flow. It’s precisely when the layoffs come that it is valuable to understand the business. You are absolutely right that ideally the business people understand and explain the business, but are you really going to trust your livelihood so completely on that? Sometimes their job is to keep you working, fixing bugs, adding features, until they reach the point they can lay you all off (this pretty much happened to a bunch of my friends at an early job). Furthermore, just building to spec suffers from the Henry Ford problem of the customer asking for faster horses. Unless your business people understand the tech as well or better than you do, it is very likely you can improve the product more if you understand the business than if you just do what you’re told. This does not have to be very time-consuming, and ideally your manager helps, but just paying a little attention, spending some time with people in other disciplines, can have huge payoffs.