I am the "newbie" in my group (I have worked here almost 3 years!). I have run into situations where I ask why a certain technique is used and not the new technique that I have read about. The answer is that they tried it 5 or 10 years ago and it was not good, or because of a bug in SQL Server...again 5 or 10 years ago.

I use the new technique and make a case to show that it does work and that the old way is more cumbersome and inefficient. Of course not in a demeaning way, just showing the statistics that show the efficiency and that the code is more easily understandable.