[eschneider]

So, so true. As a corollary, one of the best ways of becoming an 10X (or whatever N-X :) developer, is learning to gather and refine requirements. Lots of that is digging into the domain to see how things are supposed to work and working with people to understand how they need things to work. It's rarely as simple as just asking people, you need to be able to go back and forth and help them help you understand.

But yeah, if you can identify and fix potential problems at the requirements phase, you'll save yourself (everybody, really) much future pain.