One of the things I have noticed is that the ideals of design are often misused or misapplied.  More often than not (in my experience), this happens more often with developers that have more academic experience than real-world experience.

Nothing is worse than a recent CS graduate with a masters degree that has less than 2 years real-world experience creating a 23-page detailed design document for something as simple as a word-counting application.

Schools may teach software design, but they may fail to teach when it is best to forgo the design and start coding, letting let the design evolve naturally from the code, and not the other way around.

When designing first, inexperienced developers are more likely to over-engineer a solution.  They may see entire objects with rich hierarchies where a simple basic-type variable would work fine.  Only with experience does one realize to spot the situations where spending too much time on design is detrimental to a software project.

When I was younger, I learned: Think First, Code Later.  However, wisdom is what caused me to realize that thinking before coding is not necessarily the same as designing before coding.