Quite. Skilled engineers are making the right decisions 90%, 95% of the time when it comes to these soft-skills of design and architecture. But it's that 5% e

Quite. Skilled engineers are making the right decisions 90%, 95% of the time when it comes to these soft-skills of design and architecture. But it's that 5% error-rate that builds the technical debt that the project inevitably has to pay down. And if too many contributors have too-high an error rate, the wheels come off, design intent is abandoned, and mystical approaches become de rigeur (a la "This code doesn't do anything but it crashes if we remove it!") Crucially, decreasing that error-rate has a disproportionate benefit on how sustainable the things you build are. The rock-solid tech lead isn't going to shock you with her choices. In fact, she'll probably bore you by erring on the readable and easy-to-understand side of things. Eking out that 1% improvement really does take reading these books, thinking about them, thoughtfully trying to engage with them in your own work. So much effort for such a small improvement -- but this small improvement in one's own skills pays off exponentially in the work.