The answer to this is that it depends what their problem is. There is a lot of horizontal stuff that is applicable to any industry. You could get a lot of experience building (say) workflow software in one industry and reuse that knowledge in any industry. This is the classic systems analysis approach.
But if that industry uses software to solve problems directly, then you will need domain knowledge. You could be the best C programmer in the world, but without the domain knowledge all you could offer (say) a biotech company would be help in optimizing their code or writing generic functions such as the user interface or the data access. How could you write code to simulate protein folding without knowing it yourself?
But if that industry uses software to solve problems directly, then you will need domain knowledge. You could be the best C programmer in the world, but without the domain knowledge all you could offer (say) a biotech company would be help in optimizing their code or writing generic functions such as the user interface or the data access. How could you write code to simulate protein folding without knowing it yourself?