How does your network/system architect assign you work?

So we have an old battleaxe of an architect who gives zero details when assigning work, I get that he probably wants us to figure it out but his diagrams are all logical - theres no direction on how he wants things done at all. His latest idea was for me to create a vpn within vpn but had no idea how that would be achieved, i ended up getting it done but when I asked him for some help he was telling me garbage like both local and remote subnets have to be the same range. When I asked my manager about the vpn he said the architect has never configured a vpn in his life. My latest work involved configuring a dual context firewall - The architect didnt specify how many interfaces etc it should have, and the logical diagram seemed to be missing info too.

The other thing is that when he tells me to use such and such software product its shit thats 20 years old - because thats what he used previously and it just works...