[8ytecoder]

For everyone of these "grey beard" stories I can point you to a "young gun" story involving a fad of the week framework that's just over complicated and over engineered and doesn't even solve anything.

A long time we had a really good engineer who can crack topcoder and coding challenges with ease. We had a problem where we had to collect all changes to the User models and send it to the marketing platform. It was initially implemented in Rails Active Record which took progressively more time to collect and sync changes. Rails was hot at the time and SQL was really frowned upon. A lot of developers to this day hate SQL. Then came a "grey beard" who simply rewrote the whole thing into a single complex query that let the database figure out the optimum way to find the exact same data. Total time went from over 10hrs to 10mins.