>> Other favourites are spending a day designing something when someone else 
>> has already done it
>
> Sounds like either poor communication, or somebody with too much time on 
> their hands.

The former, I blame it on the way the departments are set up in the company, 
it's like they are all in competition with each other, so information 
doesn't get shared very well.  It also doesn't help that everyone thinks 
what they are doing is highly confidential and can't even be shared with 
another department...

> I suppose some people might argue that's a necessary evil when the 
> customer can't make up their mind what they want and yet demand that it 
> arrives on time. But I don't know.

Usually we give the customer a design freeze date in order for the first 
deliveries to meet their deadline.  This is fine until the customer informs 
us of a change a week before the freeze, then we have to tell them that 
actually we don't have time now to make that change - things get a bit messy 
then.

> Ooo, how about this one: Designing something when you have no spec at all, 
> and then writing a spec to match the thing you just designed. You guys 
> ever do that one?

Not really, you need to have at least a rough idea of the performance 
required before starting design work.  Of course the detail level of spec 
varies from customer to customer, but the basics are always there to start 
the design work.

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