"I would have used other solutions such as....but there were people in the room who had more 'tenure', 'experience' and 'clout' who insisted on mapreduce so tha

"I would have used other solutions such as....but there were people in the room who had more 'tenure', 'experience' and 'clout' who insisted on mapreduce so that's what my leadership team bought in on". I'd love to be able to say this in an interview one day. And I'd be telling the truth (not about Mapreduce but something else, let me tell you about the time I lost an argument with a Senior/Staff Engineer who wanted to write an entire PHP library for log files on a single-serving linux host instead of using cron and logrotate). But like you mentioned, it's a type of question I've yet to be asked. Depending on the room (ala "read the room") I might volunteer that bit of information in a more 'interview friendly' way.