Software has a special quality of being intangible, and therefore it takes some experience to identify the difference between elegant and grotesque. If you were building a suspension for a car with square wheels and a 900hp engine, you might object immediately and the wheel maker would try again. In software, if you were to object, you’d be in a lengthy discussion about wheel ‘style’ and then get assigned the implementation of your idea for the wheels and engine, which will be ignored anyway, and then you’ll be reprimanded because the suspension doesn’t work. Everybody else’s unit tests pass. The solution is to be ignorant of a better way of doing things, and deliver a cookie-cutter suspension with a unit test over a road surface shaped for square wheels. Now it’s someone else’s problem. But if you’ve ever seen a car or a road before, you’d lose your mind in these meetings knowing that nobody would buy this monstrosity. And you’d be right, but, “not a team player”.
I started reading this expecting a different kind of article that I would comment to refute, but this captures a lot of my feelings at a similar age with similar experience. I'd summarize it as saying I simply have less bullshit tolerance as I get older.