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> suss out what a stakeholder actually wants, but isn't saying due to incomplete information and/or office politics

What you are saying sounds a lot like this:

"it is common for engineers to communicate properly, but people above them prefer to be vague, because plausible deniability is a political advantage to them at the detriment of the engineer"

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EDIT: I originally had an escalatory reply here but have thought better of it. Trying again but without being an asshole: yeah, what you describe is one way miscommunications can happen. They can also happen in other ways that may be the engineer's fault, or nobody's at all. They may not happen every day, just like how you won't be deploying a new service every day, but anyone who works in an office is going to need to be able to deal with them regardless. Highly functional organizations are so because they can recover from mistakes, not because they don't make them.

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