Borderline thread necro here but...

> "Have you considered that our long lead times on inventory means we increase our holding costs?"

What's frustrating about this is now we also have to understand the business overall, and that's kind of the problem in the first place: nobody has the patience to explain it.

So in addition to coming up to speed on whatever tech stack they have, we're going to have to find someone who understands and is capable of explaining the (sometimes completely foreign to us) business side of things and come up to speed on that too. That's a lot of ramp up time, especially when nobody wants to hand out raises and you're better off finding a new gig roughly every other year anyway.

I'm currently working somewhere with people that are great at explaining the business, and are willing to discuss at length the intricacies of how anything works at any time. The tech stack is abysmal, but being able to easily understand the business makes it worth dealing with the dumpster fire of a LoB app. I'd take it over the previous job, where we had greenfield project, bleeding edge tech, and money, but nobody could tell me how the hell the business worked...

I didn't wait for anyone to explain it to me, I went to the library and checked out a bunch of books they had on Supply Chain Management/Operations Management and Inventory Control and then read them.

That gave me enough of a grasp of the principles and more importantly the nomenclature that I could then talk to people in their language not mine.

To me it's a normalised series of tables to them it's WIP inventory.

One of the things DDD got right (if you remove the buzzword bingo/hype) was the idea of a 'common language'.

Unfortunately in my experience (couple of decades) most business people don't want a common language, they want you to understand theirs.

It is surprising how little theoretical knowledge people who work in a field use on a day to day basis.

> One of the things DDD got right (if you remove the buzzword bingo/hype) was the idea of a 'common language'.

> Unfortunately in my experience (couple of decades) most business people don't want a common language, they want you to understand theirs.

The “common language” of DDD was the language of the business domain, so that’s in line with DDD.

The practical problem is that the language of many business domains is often highly context dependent, making it unsuitable for direct use where ambiguity must be avoided even without context, and trying to namespace things to map to the specific relevant business contexts is often impractical.

Yep which comes back to 'no silver bullets'.

I've found it's easier to understand their domain and map it back to mine than it is to try to build a shared domain.

Also I find business stuff interesting, it's just a nice change of pace from fighting with code.