Soft Skills Engineering

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Hi D&J! Question from Sweden! I’m a senior dev that have seen a lot of orgs without tech lead and/or staff engineer roles. I know some companies have them, but mostly newer more techy companies. Bigger older less techy companies usually have non-coding “architects”. Though that’s one title I have no good experience of, just neutral ones or worse :) In particular I’ve been in many teams without a tech lead (all developers are equal, no tiebreaker vote). It’s often successful due to a leader and/or consensus emerging organically and peacefully. I loathe the failure modes however: consensus abuse through veto (we can’t move discussion forward because someone explicitly actively disagrees, a “keeping the meeting hostage” situation), disagreement on technical priorities and choices (lowest common denominator it is…) or that the team is bickering and bikeshedding during technical discussions. Is this just a regional/cultural thing