> They were certainly not a new hire (they'd been at the company 7 years - if anything I was the new hire!), but I generally agree.

That tends to make it harder. I've experienced quite a few people more "senior" than me (either age-wise or company-tenure-wise or both) who had trouble having the less-senior guy telling them things like suggesting different designs or code refactors. Some things were just not obvious why my suggestions were better, but they were based on experience with this particular technology. So they preferred to ignore the advice and run into the issues I and other colleagues had run into 3 years prior cause they didn't want to listen. Sadly, they didn't always have to live with the consequences since some of them moved on before the consequences became obvious, so we had to clean up the mess we were suggesting against in the first place.

Ok. That's a bit different. Somebody who has been at the company for 7 years should also have the sense to ask around. But you are also right. I've worked with mathematicians and PHD's much smarter in the domain than me who wrote spaghetti code and often couldn't see the point in good code hygiene.

I've never had the experience that learning a language is harder than learning the culture and (usually bad) tools around it. Stuff like "oh no, I know the official docs say that, but no one does it that way" or "this tool is a 'hip, faster, drop-in replacement' and you'll see it recommended everywhere but the last part is actaully a lie" or "the platform says it supports this language but actually the tools are so broken that it effectively does not" et c.

[EDIT] I had in mind Android, Yarn, and AWS Lambda + Java (as of a couple years ago, anyway), in order, for those examples, for the curious :-)