[spion]

> Sometimes you get the job and when you start rolling questions and ideas, you get a "talk to the hand" followed by "that's now what you're here for". Why hire a senior person as a poster, if you're not willing to be challenged and listen to different ideas? Nobody is asking you to agree, just play ball with convincing arguments. Too much of an ask, I guess.

Convincing arguments can be hard. I know I've been asked about convincing arguments in the past and I've tried my best, but sometimes its really difficult to recall the exact details around why a particular approach didn't work. I'm working on this by using Obsidian (or better, the company's Wiki) as a knowledge graph that I can refer to in the future, but in most situations you are not able to reuse the knowledge graph from a previous job fully. Architectural decision records / design docs work well for this - perhaps ask if they have those?

I agree though, convincing argumentation is not really common in software engineering for some reason. The way we approach best practices is the most revealing IMO: instead of explaining the reasons for the practices in detail, most of the time we just list and cargo-cult them.