These are the instances where I feel it is definitely worth keeping some people around who act as glue. (or old timers). In our company - we have a tech lead r

These are the instances where I feel it is definitely worth keeping some people around who act as glue. (or old timers). In our company - we have a tech lead role which is supposed to be the technical point of contact for a given team. This person is expected to have answers or have a way to find the right answers about the nuances of the team. The good ones are invaluable. Whenever new projects come up, the modus operandi is to write a proposal, review it with your current team for sanity (on whether it achieves its purpose) and then with this group of relevant stake holders / tech leads to ensure you're not getting some giant thing wrong that can nuke some other part of the business. The problem I see with this role though - we (I am the one for analytics and one of the TLs for Data Infrastructure at Snap) have to handle 20-25 hours of meetings around all these coordination AND ensure some work gets done in your own area so that you are in touch with the code bases you are fiddling with. So as much of an alluring title that is, you are giving up deep dive development (like I was able to do building storage engines for DynamoDB). Tradeoffs :/ And there are cases where the tech leads don't have the answers (new or incompetent) OR they think of a weird case couple of months down the line, but this works out overall. I probably should write a blog about this - but anyway, I don't know how this works out in the non-software world: Why wouldn't you have a knowledge person/council around?