Ergo Decedo
Every engineering team has a version of this exchange. Someone raises an objection about how the team ships: the review is too thin, the deploy window is reckless. The answer skips the practice and goes straight at the person who raised it.
How long have you been doing this. Have you shipped at this scale before. Maybe this isn't the right team for you.
Call it ergo decedo, the therefore-you-leave move. It takes a claim about a process and answers it with a claim about the objector's standing to have an opinion on the process. The original objection sits there, unaddressed, while the conversation moves to a different court.
The move works because something real underwrites it. Seniority really does correlate with judgment, often enough that the correlation is worth something. People who've watched a deploy go bad at 2am develop priors the rest of us haven't earned yet. A lead who's shipped through three outages has genuinely seen failure modes a two-month hire hasn't. When that lead says you'll understand once you've been here longer, there's frequently a true fact underneath it: the newer person is missing context that would change their view.
That's what makes ergo decedo dangerous rather than merely rude. It borrows a real signal. If seniority tracked judgment zero percent of the time, the move would be laughed out of the room. It works because it tracks often enough, in aggregate, across a career's worth of disagreements, to feel earned even in the specific case where it isn't. A base rate that holds across many cases gets cashed as proof in this one, without anyone showing the work.
Here is the tell. Genuine seniority-based judgment, when pushed, cashes out. Push back on "you'll get it later" and a person arguing in good faith will eventually name the incident: we tried loose review in 2019, shipped a data-loss bug that took a weekend to unwind, and that's why the friction exists. The seniority is a pointer toward the argument that would justify the practice. Ergo decedo never resolves to that pointer. Push on it and instead of a mechanism you get the original claim repeated in a different register: you'll see, this isn't up for debate, maybe you're not a fit here. That's the diagnostic: whether the experience ever turns into an argument, or just repeats itself as a verdict.
It's also why the move is cheaper to deploy than to receive. Defending a shipping practice on its merits costs something: you have to be right about the mechanism, specific about the tradeoff, and open to being told the tradeoff no longer holds. Reframing the objection as a belonging question costs nothing. It requires only that the other person be new enough, or junior enough, for the base rate to be invoked plausibly. The burden quietly flips: instead of the incumbent defending the practice, the dissenter has to establish they've earned the right to question it.
There's an asymmetry underneath all of this that keeps the move in circulation. Raising the objection costs the dissenter something real, it's on the record, gettable later as "pushback issues" in a review. The incumbent risks nothing symmetrical by reframing it, because the frame makes it sound like concern rather than retaliation. A bad defense of a shipping practice eventually gets tested against reality, the outage happens or it doesn't. A bad ergo decedo just gets absorbed as normal team dynamics, because nobody goes back to check whether the junior person turned out to be right.
None of this means junior objections are usually correct, or that experience should carry no weight in a disagreement about how a team ships. Experience usually should carry weight. Ergo decedo's flaw is structural: it produces the identical verdict, defer, and maybe leave, whether the objection was right or wrong. A test that returns the same answer regardless of the input isn't testing anything. It's wearing the shape of a test.
The honest version of "you'll understand once you've been here longer" is an IOU: a specific answer, coming later, once shared context exists. Ergo decedo cashes that IOU without ever intending to pay it. The debt just sits there, uncollected, for as long as nobody asks.