Comment by WorldMaker

That still so much assumes a "waterfall" ideal world where specs can be captured up front perfectly and coding is just an inevitable artifact of that with no creative input/feedback into the spec.

At least in my experience, that ideal has never existed. "Engineering" (and "re-engineering" and "re-re-engineering" in the agile worlds) was always what I was spending the majority of my time on. Coding was a medium for the engineering. By the time I finished the engineering the code was either already finished, being discovered in the written code and then documented, or the code was "the fun part" reward for all the hard engineering work that lead to it (and all the ugly specs documents it took to get there).