> All meaningful decisions and choices are made by the developers themselves Depends on a type of project and many other factors. If you're say building a busi

> All meaningful decisions and choices are made by the developers themselves Depends on a type of project and many other factors. If you're say building a business app for a client delegating architecture decisions to individual devs on "as-needed" bases means either that all members of team need to be equally capable, have an excellent understanding of client's business and very clear and uniform vision of bigger picture where project is going - or more commonly that you'll end up with a terrible, suboptimal mess of different approaches and interpretations of requirements. Also you usually don't want to pay 10 expensive devs to study the client's business and specifications for days or weeks, when you can have just one do it and propose the solutions to others. So you need a person in charge, and you need that person to know how to do it good, because not everyone, even senior devs, is equally capable of tracking all the moving parts and envisioning the optimal solution. It's a job for someone who's good at it, and you can call them architect or tech lead or whatever, title doesn't matter, but letting them be focused on global picture instead of doing little isolated tasks with everyone else will save you a lot of headache. However, I totally agree with you that often people hired to do that are not really good at it, just like a lot of managers are not very good in managing projects (and many devs are not very good in programming I guess). The problem there is not with the role itself, but HR and the organization.