I never worked anywhere that was truly waterfall and I've been in the industry for almost 30 years. The best projects I worked on have been iterative with some

I never worked anywhere that was truly waterfall and I've been in the industry for almost 30 years. The best projects I worked on have been iterative with some sort of upfront design phase for each iteration, where an "iteration" was a large chunk... like a couple months... You might hear this referred to as the "spiral" model. There are many shades of gray between "waterfall" and true "agile" and I'd argue that neither extreme actually works.