Comment by asa400

100%. The thing I'm currently working on has been a pain probably 80% because the work was underspecified and didn't take a bunch of legacy concerns into account and probably 20% because of nature of the code itself.

If it was better specified I'd be done already, but instead I've had to go back and forth with multiple people multiple times about what they actually wanted, and what legacy stuff is worth fixing and not, and how to coordinate some dependent changes.

Most of this work has been the oft-derided "soft skills" that I keep hearing software engineers don't need.