I've realized something funny. It should be the company's interest to encourage employees to have productive debates and spend effort figuring out the best course on action, while in reality, from the perspective of an employee, it's an uphill battle to have your voice heard, with no reward at the end. Therefore, what a smart employee does, is shutting the fuck up.
Case in point: in my current team there's one very vocal senior who needs to have things done his way, but other than that, the willingness to participate in discussions is inversely correlated with experience, and the most experienced devs simply ran out of fucks to give because they're not getting paid extra for the time they spent in fruitless discussions. The end result is that the knowledge ends up being unused and we implement stupid ideas.
The reward for those things is either more work for no increase in pay or you're in conflict with one or more people who are now bad mouthing you to the boss and you'll eventually be fired or be made so miserable that you'll voluntarily leave.
Case in point: in my current team there's one very vocal senior who needs to have things done his way, but other than that, the willingness to participate in discussions is inversely correlated with experience, and the most experienced devs simply ran out of fucks to give because they're not getting paid extra for the time they spent in fruitless discussions. The end result is that the knowledge ends up being unused and we implement stupid ideas.