Most of this is fixable by driving YAGNI into their heads.<p>Beyond that, I would claim that most people startups look for (recent graduates) have no ability to understand the reason behind popular opinions.  Because they don&#x27;t have the experience to do so.  They might be able to parrot it though.<p>Interestingly, I&#x27;m used to working in a pretty fluid environment without a lot of specs.  But we recently started developing something with very tight rules and an extremely picky end user.  It&#x27;s much less efficient without a set of specs, which the project managers didn&#x27;t have the constitution to make since we aren&#x27;t used to doing so.  As a result I basically have to constantly go back to them on things, which isn&#x27;t very productive.