I'm a junior engineer, but I've worked at two companies now. In both cases I've found that my colleagues and I are assigned tasks with no thought put into the design before being told to do it.

Typically I spend about 90% of my time writing down on paper how I'm going to do the task, then the code sort of writes itself in maybe a day, sometimes two if I run into difficulties with an API.

Is there something strange about this picture? Is the design supposed to be the work? I don't really begrudge it, I quite like the designing of things.

But it seems to me it would be more productive to together as a team determine the design of everything to be done, and then everyone can go away and do it pretty quickly, this would put everyone on the wavelength, and so there would be less instances of interfaces not being as you'd like. I feel that once the design is done, the coding is essentially a series of 'write a function which takes in X and does Y', which anyone can easily do except perhaps in the case of some complex algorithm being required.

I am thinking of asking my team if we could try designing things up front, before assigning the work. But I am not sure if they will be up for this, or if it's a ridiculous idea and that's why I've not seen anyone do it.