[Smudge]

Yes, I've seen this too. I think I've even been that person. (But that's a different story.)

The first company I worked for claimed that most new employees took 6 months to ramp up to the internal tools & processes, which sounded absurd to me until I actually started ramping up myself. Holy cow. And the people who were entrenched in this company's particular way of doing things seemed like absolute geniuses until I realized how much of their knowledge came from years and years of doing the same things over and over.

I think the best way to combat this is to recognize that tools, techniques, processes, and technologies are all an inherent part of your product and your business. Much like you take the time to refactor code and combat technical debt, I think it's pretty crucial to also devote time to combating "process-debt" and/or "tooling-debt" -- all of that extra cruft that piles up and starts becoming "the way" to do things at your company. Because, just like with code, there is usually a simpler, more practical and/or elegant solution just waiting to be discovered.

[nostrademons]

I've noticed this, but usually consider it a feature, not a bug. The better companies are at least aware that this is going on, and can use it to their advantage when it suits them or counteract it when it doesn't.

The thing is - if you zoom out, "experience" is nothing more than overspecialization in the particular environment you found yourself. That applies at the industry, society, evolutionary, and planetary levels as well. Organisms adapt to the particular circumstances that they live in. Usually these adaptations are beneficial, because otherwise they get pruned out and people adopt different ways of doing things. But sometimes the environment changes in a way that makes all that accumulated knowledge irrelevant, and you end up like the dinosaurs. Extinct.

I've found that most of the time, people's knowledge is the product of hard-won experience, and if you tear it down, you will encounter the same problems that led to them coming to those conclusions in the first place. But occasionally, something changes in the environment, and you need to tear things down to adapt. If you want to build off existing knowledge, become an employee, and join a company that's busy figuring out all the corollaries of the premise that founded it. If you want to challenge existing premises, become a founder, and look for areas where the environment has changed in a way that invalidates existing knowledge.

If you try to build something totally new and different by learning all the existing ways people have built stuff, you will probably fail (believe me, I've tried several times). Similarly, if you join an organization hoping to tear down all the wisdom they've accumulated and replace it with an outsider's perspective, you will probably meet significant resistance. Sometimes organisms have to die to learn.