[lawnchair_larry]

Your PSA comes from the perspective of a smart employee with good ideas falling on deaf ears with the dumb CTO.

What of the good CTOs who have mediocre teams with a lot of bad ideas that are poorly thought out?

Note: if you answer with something like "CTO should quit", "CTO should fire them", you fail this question.

[steventhedev]

In the case of a truly bad idea, it is the duty of the CTO/VP Eng/Team lead to give the employee the time to explore the idea/discuss it and realize why it's a bad idea. The employee should grow as a result of the experience, and become more valuable in the future.

On the off chance they don't learn, and the situation repeats itself, it may be prudent to refuse such requests.

That having been said, the worst situation is when the boss agrees that it needs to get done, but can't find where to sneak it into the schedule. It's effectively saying that you don't value the happiness of your employees and can't schedule/push hard enough.

[angersock]

If the CTO doesn't respect the team ("they're mediocre"), that's a problem. CTO needs to accept the materials at hand, and build a framework for growing those employees and protecting them from their own ingenuity--if the "right way" of doing something is so much easier than the alternative, and its practice is explained and documented, then the rest should see to itself.

That conservative policy still leaves room for explaining why a given bad idea is bad, or for exploring that idea for like a workday or two so the employee can figure out why it's bad.

If after all this the CTO is still besieged by idiots, they should leave...either because they have failed their team, or because the team is deadset against succeeding.