Most of this is fixable by driving YAGNI into their heads. Beyond that, I would claim that most people startups look for (recent graduates) have no ability to

Most of this is fixable by driving YAGNI into their heads. Beyond that, I would claim that most people startups look for (recent graduates) have no ability to understand the reason behind popular opinions. Because they don't have the experience to do so. They might be able to parrot it though. Interestingly, I'm used to working in a pretty fluid environment without a lot of specs. But we recently started developing something with very tight rules and an extremely picky end user. It's much less efficient without a set of specs, which the project managers didn't have the constitution to make since we aren't used to doing so. As a result I basically have to constantly go back to them on things, which isn't very productive.