Me too. The very few design specs I've seen during my 15+ yrs as a programmer are typically high-level enough to be the mechanical equivalent of "cogs needed h

Me too. The very few design specs I've seen during my 15+ yrs as a programmer are typically high-level enough to be the mechanical equivalent of "cogs needed here, and springs!". What kind of cogs, e.g. diameter, teeth count, diameter of the center hole (should the hole even be in the center?) and what kind of springs are never mentioned. If you ask the customer about functionality their response is "we want it to work and we wanted it yesterday!". So what you have is an intuitive feel of what the customer wants and so you write some code to see how it could come together. Then you show it to the customer to see if this is what they wanted and BAM!! The sales rep at your company just sold it to five other customers while you were at coffee break waiting for the response of the original customer. It's barely a prototype, not even an alpha. It's five lines of code and a mock up UI. Bug reports start piling in. The sales rep keep pestering you every five minutes at Skype/email/phone/whatnot because the customers refuse to pay before the bugs are fixed and the sales rep is not getting his bonus before the money is in. The filed bugs are actually just badly concealed feature requests and the software for which you just started getting a nice mental model over starts to grow the most hideous excrescences. Especially as you have to hire a bunch of new developers just to keep up with the piling bug reports. There's no time to train them or even teach them what the software is supposed to do. "What do I do? Where do I start?" "Look at the bug reports and fix them!" "Which should I start with?" "The ones labeled 'blocker'" But they are all labeled 'blocker' because the sales rep has write access to Jira. You tried to prevent that but then the sales rep escalated all the way to the CEO: "I need write access so I can fill in info from the customers!" Sounds perfectly safe and sane. It's not. But you don't have time to think about that because the sales rep keep Skyping you links to Jira asking "Is it done? Is it done?". You uninstall Skype and your email client and shut off your phone just to get some work done. After an hour the sales rep comes by with the CEO: "What are you doing? We need this fixed now!" Then the yelling starts. You quit your job. Get another. It's the same deal. The software is FOOBAR but just usable enough that the customers put it everywhere. Airplanes start to crash. Cooling systems at power plants start to fail. Nuclear systems for Mutual Assured Destruction start to detect incoming missiles. THE END