I submit that you will always interface with people who are not purely technical, no matter how technical your role. But it is in the most technical roles that it's hardest to learn how to match your language to a given audience (for lack of practice/opportunities), so I actually think these are the groups that need to consciously work on developing this skill the most.
> I submit that you will always interface with people who are not purely technical, no matter how technical your role.
This is provably false though, I've worked in jobs where entire large teams never talked to non-technical people.
What you maybe meant is that you always talk to people less technical than you, which is true, but that is a very different statement. For example, when I worked on developer tooling at Google the stakeholders were all developers, the director was a developer, the directors for the orgs we worked with were developers, the product managers were former developers etc. There was just no non-technical people in sight. But you still need to talk to people who are less technical than you, that is still true, but it isn't true that all jobs needs to be able to talk to non-technical people.
I think many misses all the people who work in the background because you don't see or talk to them, but they still exist.
That's fair. I concede that there are jobs that in no part rely on communicating with non-technical people. But I still believe you will find it beneficial to be able to explain your work to non-technical audiences. Your family, your lawyer, or a future hiring manager will all value it.
All I did was work on/design math/algorithm libraries. I can of course explain that I write code, and which parts of Google used it, but I can't explain anything I produced to non-technical people since there is nothing left when you removed the technical details.
I also worked on server message routing. I can explain that it is basically like the internet, ie explain why my job is important, but explaining any of my projects to a layperson wouldn't be possible without teaching the layperson a lot of technical skills.
