I joined Elbit as a junior engineer, into a real-time defense engineering culture built entirely on plain C. I pushed the group toward object-oriented methods and design patterns, and proposed a C++ subset of my own for real-time use, drawing on known standards and what I understood of how the compiler actually behaved. The first project built that way succeeded, and the company moved to object-oriented development because of it — a real technology bet, made by the most junior person in the room, that had to win purely on its own merits. Getting the technical case right was one part of the job. The other was getting experienced engineers to adopt a way of working they hadn’t chosen, without making them feel overruled. That part took the rest of the project.