I agree. But I think the reason that laypeople don't have a good sense of what is required is that we wall them off from the software so that they have little s

I agree. But I think the reason that laypeople don't have a good sense of what is required is that we wall them off from the software so that they have little sense for how the existing stuff is constructed. I do think that other people in the organization usually have a better sense of needs. And so if they could have a better understanding of the materials, they could do a better job of managing requirements than an engineer who looks at code all day, and is typically not observing the customers. Your advice about UNIX is good. I try not to write modules larger than a few hundred lines of code. Anything bigger than that gets split into fully isolated modules with well defined interfaces. Also: I'm sad you're sad. And I'm sad because I feel my tools isolate me from the people I would like to be working closely with. But I'm very optimistic about solving this problem. I think all of the building blocks are there to solve it, we just haven't made a concerted effort as a community because we're mostly under the impression that it's impossible for non-coders to understand code.