> As an “older,” I’ve encountered this exact attitude. Same here. I was frustrating to watch young engineers insist on ignoring well-established knowledge onl

> As an “older,” I’ve encountered this exact attitude. Same here. I was frustrating to watch young engineers insist on ignoring well-established knowledge only to go out and make mistakes that cost the company 6 to 8 months and hundreds of thousands of dollars, maybe more. And they were warned about the very things that happened during design reviews. Two examples (without getting into identifiable details): A complex mechanical assembly intended for challenging thermal and dynamic (vibration) environment. After studying the design I told the 20-something mechanical engineer the approach she took to the distribution of loads would fail instantly. This was done professionally, one-on-one and without any "attitude", to use the term. Her response: "I have a Masters degree in Mechanical Engineering from MIT, I think I know what I am doing.". Six months later the assembly, quite literally, exploded during the vibration test. Even after that she still refused to listen to my recommendations. This joke easily cost the company a million dollars and six months of wasted effort. If you consider this in the context of the larger project, the cost and delays could have been an order of magnitude greater. Second example. A EE designing a board to drive a bunch of LEDs. Again, 20-something. If I remember correctly, the board had 15 independent channels. He executed this as what I call "datasheet design". He picked a switched-mode LED driver, used the circuit from the datasheet with little modification and stuffed the board with 15 of these circuit blocks. The board ends-up having hundreds of components, it bigger than what we wanted and complexity/reliability/RFI were of concern. After studying this I had a meeting with him and explained that we could use an analog circuit with somewhere around four components per channel to drive the LEDs with excellent efficiency. The board would shrink to 1/4 the size, use 80% less components, have a less intense RF signature, etc. In this particular case, he actually laughed at me and said something like "Are you crazy? Everyone knows linear drive of LEDs is the most inefficient thing you can do". Of course, this is precisely the kind of thing a book-smart engineer who just copies circuits from datasheets would say. Not only is this not true, it is ridiculously easy math to show how you can build efficient LED drivers in the analog domain with just a few components (hint: control the power supply voltage with an efficient switched-mode regulator set to a precise voltage based on the LED string Vf range). Once again, this design was implemented. It caused untold problems in the context of the greater project, all of which required mitigation in some form. I don't know what it is. When I was a 20-something engineer I was eager to listen to and work with the older engineers. I learned more this way than I can possibly describe. Not just about engineering, about life.