Again, this is not an issue. You could make up a bunch of questions about pretty much anything, it's always going to be questions and answers in a management ch

Again, this is not an issue. You could make up a bunch of questions about pretty much anything, it's always going to be questions and answers in a management chain. The point is that all this stuff can be answered by the two people as a team, and if they disagree they have to figure out a mature way to present their disagreement or manage to convince each other. If you're an experienced engineer and you think your solution is better than the junior's, then by all means just lay it out for your teammate to understand and accept it. If you can't even convince your teammate, I'd be worried about what you're going to do about your superiors all the way to the CTO. Ultimately if there are a couple paths then you end up listing the trade-offs together as a team, genuinely, and you present THAT to your superior so that you can have a higher-level discussion about what they see and want from their perspective. You do the homework together, and you do it well enough so that your manager doesn't have to work for you.. Which you should be able to do anyway if you were about to be the manager, right?