Another time I had an older PhD moved to my area (outside his) where we were trying to meet a number of objectives. He said in a meeting that "it is mathematicaly impossible" to achieve one of our performance goals. I quietly went back to the lab and ran my new control algorithm and documented hitting that goal. Never refuted him, just filed the incident away in my head.
Edit: People being arrogant or know-it-all is probably not especially correlated with having obtained a PhD, but more with overall frame of mind, and I find this comment to be a uselessly negative ad-hominem.
That's not to say it's a perfect correlation. I know plenty of people with PhDs who don't have the problem in the XKCD cartoon. But I too am careful hiring PhDs in tech jobs. Professional work is just very different than academic work. It takes time to learn it for people whose main focus is the theory. After all, "In theory, theory and practice are the same. But in practice..."