Painless Functional Specifications - Part 1: Why Bother?

Why won't people write specs? People claim that it's because they're saving time by skipping the spec-writing phase. They act as if spec-writing was a luxury reserved for NASA space shuttle engineers, or people who work for giant, established insurance companies. Balderdash.

Spolsky, Joel. Joel on Software (2000). Articles>Writing>Specifications>Software