One thing I've noticed since I've become an engineer who gets to design the architecture:

No matter what I do, eventually algebraic structures like semi-groups and monads along with categorical structure like lenses and traversals keep popping up.

It seems like the sort of thing that system designers could benefit from understanding, but the ordinary users of a system shouldn't need to know about it.

In my experience such categories pop up when dealing with immutable data, which is common in many domains.