[rikthevik]

I think the requirements for the house change a lot more than you think. There's definitely a push/pull with the client in civil engineering as well. And for contractors, oh boy, do they deal with clients changing things on them constantly.

I don't have much faith in most Enterprisey teams to ship good software even if they have a thorough concrete spec. We love to blame changing / incomplete specs, but I'd imagine that most dysfunctional teams would manage to bone up a perfect spec anyway.

[weaksauce]

The largest problem is that the people telling you what they want are not good enough to through every possible path the user may want to go down. This leads to specs that are ambiguous at best, contradictory at worst. It takes a good developer to see the hidden things in the spec and raise the questions that need to be asked before the development goes too far down a bad path.

[rmc]

Programmers have it worse: http://ifaq.wap.org/computers/architects.html