> you will have to demonstrate that you understand why things are this way and why it's better before we even have this conversation

I can fling that back to you: very often the team hates the conclusion I arrive at, which is "It worked during your initial crunch and then everyone is just afraid to change it, which means your test coverage is far from good -- why is it not enriched?"

I am not trying to be an arse on purpose but the inertia and cargo-culting and tribe-defending practices I've seen during my contracting years (10-11) made me almost physically sick. Programmers are a fiercely territorial bunch and it's often to the detriment of the organization.

Of course the reverse cases exist: where the domain is difficult and ugly hacks had to be done so the project works and makes money. Absolutely. I love receiving this knowledge and integrating it; makes for interesting engineering discussions.

> Greenfield dev, trusted engineer getting from 0 -> 1 on something big? Maybe it shouldn't be held up in committee for 2 weeks. Maybe most objections will be superficial stylistic concerns.

Yep, full agree. And often times these stylistic concerns are not even that; they are often "I suffered here at the beginning, this green-horn should suffer as well!" which is honestly pathetic and it also happens quite a lot.