[la_barba]

I don't think its any different than devs thinking they need to "future proof" (a silly idea anyway) their database design for millions of transactions , or needlessly fretting about scale problems that their tiny company is never going to see for YEARS. Or people who copy $famous_dev's coding environment, or coding style or whatever. All people do this in various ways. The only truth here is that it's far easier to point out someone else's flaws.

To take your interview example, you can't really convince a company (or anyone for that matter) they are doing something wrong, if what they're doing is making them money/success. It is a very powerful form of feedback that gets ingrained and is almost impossible to shakeoff.