You also have to be careful about who the authority is and how they got to be an authority. Gary Kasparov obviously got to his place via a metric which is hard

You also have to be careful about who the authority is and how they got to be an authority. Gary Kasparov obviously got to his place via a metric which is hard to argue against; you don't know how a senior dev got promoted to be a senior dev. I know a senior "engineer" but really a dev who's rewritten this one piece of software, first in go, then in c++, then in go, over the course of a year. There are no unit tests and no integration tests. Documentation is spotty. A second senior who has a PhD in engineering and no go experience started work and she immediately found several race conditions and complained that the code was written in a fashion that was provably incompatible with concurrency.