[deanmoriarty]

It is surprising that this still happens, but I’ve had senior engineers (L6-L7 from FAANG) join my teams (multiple examples, different companies) and in the first couple days make extremely superficial but strong arguments on how the architecture of a system should be completely revisited, and how libraries that have been in production for years should just be rewritten from scratch asap.

In virtually all cases the suggestion was extremely naive and coming from a lack of understanding of all the requirements. This did not come from a curious angle “wondering if we could do X?”, it was always based on some ground truth they knew better.

Very calmly, you start explaining to them all the key requirements that they just missed in their grand vision. Upon hearing those, some will decide to double down and come up, on the spot, with increasingly complex and arcane evolutions of their initial proposal (this is always very comical, and painful to witness), while others will quickly get the message and basically say “oh sorry, seems like I lack a lot of context, please ignore”.

And let’s not even talk about their first code reviews.

I truly don’t know what goes in someone’s head when they decide, shortly after joining, to dismiss years of work of a competent team who has objectively solved problems for the business.

[satvikpendem]

I mentioned this in another comment but this is basically the parable of Chesterton's Fence.