this reminds me of the last manager I had who used to be a developer, I think he was probably a pretty good developer - but not as good as he thought he was, because he thought he was good enough that he could tell you how things worked and why you were wrong without any knowledge of the code base or experience actually using the various 3rd party services that were being integrated.
I tried to develop the skill of nodding and then doing it correctly later, but it would always hit because there was a ticket I had written getting assigned to another dev and I had to explain to them why it was the way I had specified, and then he would correct me, and I would say yes part of what you say is correct and needs to be considered (as I said, I think he was a good developer at one time) but not all of it and he would insist he was correct and I had to go talk it over later with the dev as to why it worked the way I specified.
That sounds awful. The manager is clearly not doing their job well, so avoiding their opinion and covering their mistakes is imho counterproductive. Instead, I would let my reservations be known and proceed exactly as they suggested. If it works, great, I have learned something. If not, let's scrape this and do it right, this time with manager's knowledge.
But in the end, if you can't work with the manager, it's time to head to greener pastures.
One other way of reining in such a manager in is to bring someone in the meeting who the manager trusts and who you too have good rapport with, and have them say the same points that you would have made otherwise.
Effectively a form of trust and reputation arbitrage, but it was effective for dealing with a particularly difficult manager who didn’t accept certain things about the design of an API, and yet when the other guy told him the same things, he just asked a few mild follow ups and accepted what I was telling him all along.
Yeah absolutely, I've used this for improvement suggestions too. Decide what you want to do, and then find the most big name source who's said basically the same thing, and then quote them pretending you're just relaying their message.
I tried to develop the skill of nodding and then doing it correctly later, but it would always hit because there was a ticket I had written getting assigned to another dev and I had to explain to them why it was the way I had specified, and then he would correct me, and I would say yes part of what you say is correct and needs to be considered (as I said, I think he was a good developer at one time) but not all of it and he would insist he was correct and I had to go talk it over later with the dev as to why it worked the way I specified.