"common solutions are frequently dogma" tell me about it. Developers who don't (or won't) engage their brain and think about _why_ they're doing _what_ they're doing is the bane of my life

I work with someone who loves optimisation, i.e. reading books and then assuming everything we do is wrong and demanding we change it.

Glad I'm past the point where he liked to spend hours arguing that stuff. Hard to make someone understand that just because someone wrote something in a book it doesn't mean it makes sense for our application or development needs. Theory loses out to practicality in real applications.