Something I've noticed in US software development culture over the last 30 years is the desire to rush in and do something (anything!) rather than take time to think through the challenge in advance and thereby eliminate a lot of potential dead-ends and effort-sinks. There's a UK company that does custom programming for the defense community and they typically spend 80% of the time analyzing the requirements and considering a range of design alternatives before then putting the solution together in pseudocode before finally spending the final 20% on actual programming, testing, and debugging. The result: faster delivery of far more robust product than if they'd just rushed in and started hammering away at the keyboard.