[beh9540]

Waterfall is certainly a thing - although it's taken most of my career to run into it. Where I work currently (banking) some of the projects are waterfall, some are agile. The waterfall group has requirements gathered for them by the stakeholders, they build to spec, it's tested by the stakeholders after development is complete, issues are fixed and then it's deployed, all managed by a project management team. There's a series of "phase exits" that need to be signed off on by executives in a big meeting, and the project doesn't move backwards. Massive amounts of documentation are generated (and never read, except by external auditors) for every aspect of the application - every workflow, procedure and logic built into the application. Iteration doesn't happen at all, everything is a massive project, or bug fixes.

All the "boogeyman" activities happen - scope creep goes crazy, testing is run short to hit deadlines set, etc. Like you I never really thought it was a thing until I saw it with my own eyes.