I usually summarize this thusly: "I have already made the mistake you are about to make". It should be obvious the time savings would worth it to "rent" me. And I am months away from my 40th birthday.
She gave the job to her three dozen "supportive" young programmers, who ended up taking 28 months (!!) to get the "4-month" project finally working.
So, after all that, did she eventually apologize and tell me that, yes, she'd made the same mistake I told her I'd seen before with the same results for the same reason, and that she should have at least asked me more about it instead of throwing me out? Of course not. This is the real world. She never spoke to me again and never forgave me.
At that point, the damage was done. I tried to explain why her approach of changing N things simultaneously wasn't more efficient than changing N things sequentially because of the combinatorial explosion of interactions, but she wasn't technical enough to understand what I meant by that, which made her angrier, and when I suggested an approach that would give us a temporary "Plan B" just in case we "ended up a couple of weeks late", she declared me "unsupportive" and ended the meeting.
Nobody really likes it, but half of the "politicality" of management has to be set in place to allow people to communicate with others who may or may not suffer from a sensitive ego and the company hasn't had time to figure it out yet. On top of that, it's usually a judgement call and may be a poor idea to formalize into your process an escape hatch based on judgement.
So maybe the original mistake was from the manager who presented a sensitive idea without enough seriousness to induce a careful response. Or the op who was too quick to feel comfortable interpreting it as a joke in what turned out to be a serious meeting. Or the culture which enabled the terms of the meeting to be ambiguous to begin with.
Only after that can you get into things like speculation on the maturity of the manager. It's actually quite a high maturity bar to jump over to stomach being laughed at by an expert. Not saying you can't set that as a goal, but merely that you ought to think about what happens when you find yourself dealing with someone who hasn't met that expectation.
There's nothing wrong with him. As I wrote above, as the brain ages, you get more experience and depth and foresight. The problem is that the decisions that use these abilities don't belong to programmers - they belong to managers (in this case the VP).
This is one of the main recipes for perennial frustration - be an older programmer trying to act like a manager from the bottom of the hierarchy.
When empirical thought is your bread and butter, as it is in the case of software developers, it's hard to see why you should have to acquiesce to the VP's ego. If one intentionally stays off the political tracks, there really is no reason they should have to play unreasonable political games. Workplaces would be much more efficient if we accepted, or at least heard, the advice of the people who get paid for their expertise, instead of cowering in fear that we may damage the ego of some fragile soul who ended up in management because they were not competent to do any real work directly.
It's true that workplaces would be a lot more efficient under the regime you describe. It's also true that if my aunt had a dick she'd be my uncle. I'm suggesting that it might be a good idea for engineers to do the same thing as everybody else in the world and try to figure out when to wear sweatpants.
I agree with you that developers would be well-served by making a stronger effort to play along with the superficial niceties of corporate politics, but like I said, this transcends that and gets into a professional duty to advise against. If the workplace is so corrupt that reasonable opposition to a blatantly silly implementation plan can only result in the correct subordinate getting shuffled around and possibly fired, it's a liability for professionals to continue employment there.
Unfortunately most of management ones will not tolerate unaligned lower ranks and are unable to utter the words "he may have a point" to themselves and regroup and refocus.
Instead they will do whatever is necessary to remove the opposition.
See the Challenger for recent high profile examples.
in reality, your only two options are either quit, or be the VP. as a non-executive/manager, you don't run the show, end of story.
There is almost no upside working anywhere near her. She would screw up every meaningful project and attach failure to professional reputations of everyone involved.
What was the approach she was trying to use to deal with a "hard deadline"?
I just assumed we would make a gradual transition, replacing the two stack layers one at a time, and starting each of those replacements with new, non-strategic web apps (ex: a mailing list signup sheet for some small event), always getting things working before extending the rollout. We would get as many things working as possible by the "hard deadline", and our customers for these new products (who would be developers themselves and would know that these were new products for us) would understand that a gradual replacement of our old technologies was just good engineering, not a sign that our new products weren't good.
But she told me with a smile that we were going to replace all of our Web apps simultaneously with a matched set of replacements showcasing what could be done with our new products (one of which would require using a version so new it wasn't even feature frozen much less production-ready, to show off our coming features) and, as long as we were changing two critical layers of the stack simultaneously, we would change all the other layers, too, right down to the OS and hardware "and just do it right".
And I assumed I was just laughing with her--yeah, yeah, very funny--until we both suddenly realized what was actually happening.
(And, I don't work for her. I was transferred elsewhere, and she was eventually laid off.)