"I have an overwhelming empathy for developers in this position. They have more information than they will ever need, but it’s completely disorganized. It’s like trying to build a ten piece puzzle, except you have to find the ten pieces within a pile of 10,000,000,000 pieces, all of which are square, and you don’t know what it’s supposed to look like at the end. Good luck."
Even with a team of highly experienced developers things quickly turn to a mess if it's not perfectly clear what to work on. I don't mean things like "button should go 1px north to align with header". That's trivial. In fact, I would go so far as to say: most production-ready programming is trivial. Trivial in the sense that someone, somewhere, solved it in a way that's correct. But, when it is not /crystal/ clear what the requirements are, what the business case is, or what the edge-cases look like: oh my. I've been in the incredibly unlucky position of only being in settings like this. Start-ups, academia, R&D positions. And, as a result even with the best intentions and the best teams you'll still produce production-quality garbage. Mostly because incentives were misaligned and there was no coherent vision. Agile story-driven development only works when there is leadership that has the guts to say "no", and when there is something well defined to work on. Sometimes I yearn for some CRUD webstore ... at least then the things are knowable. Anyway, just my rant. I'll probably go the meme-way of becoming a plumber/welder/etc at some point ;-)