Usually the higher ups like the Generals or the Managers knew everything about the project and could co-ordinate the workers into working on the fragments that made up the project.

The law firm I worked at was a lot worse than that, I was given minimual details, so vauge that even Sherlock Holmes couldn't figure them out. When I asked coworkers they usually gave me a "I dunno" answer and shrugged their shoulders, and many of them were in meetings about it that I was not invited to. So it took some extra thinking and guesswork to get the job done, but a lot slower than had I actually had the full details that I needed to get the job done.

My last job was with a small business that had virtually no rules or guidelines for programming, just a coworker who called me "An idiot" when my programming style was not the same as hers. She also kept changing the database column and table names, so it made my job harder. We went from Access to SQL Server, so I removed the spaces in the table and column names to keep compatability, but she made me change them back. The owner of the company kept telling her that we were coworkers, but she continued to be bossy right up to the day I was let go. She was verbally abusive, she ignored what I suggested for the programs, and about three other coworkers had tried to work with her before developing software, and quit and went back to their old jobs.