> what if part of the role that’s being hired for is to help people clearly define the specs and requirements?

Then they should have responded to his questions in email?

I personally love working on projects that are vaguely defined because it means getting to interact with people and understanding the heart of the problem. My favorite roles have involved reaching out to non-technical people and figuring out how to solve their problem. Often it's not the solution they even initially asked for.

But if your role is to guess about vague specs with no communication, then you're going to fail no matter how senior you are.