Well, I'd answer that with two things 1) good leadership is probably rare, and 2) doing the wrong thing isn't always wrong. In my experience, the best leadersh

Well, I'd answer that with two things 1) good leadership is probably rare, and 2) doing the wrong thing isn't always wrong. In my experience, the best leadership comes from people who don't hyper-focus on one thing, but are constantly thinking about many different things, mostly centered around the customer experience (because that's the whole point of this thing: to make/sell/run a product, not to have perfect software craftsmanship). I find those people rare and usually not working at lower levels of a product. In a sense, doing the wrong thing is perfectly fine if you don't need to be doing the right thing to provide a great customer experience. Of course maintainability, availability, recoverability, extensibility, etc are all necessary considerations, but even within these you can often do the wrong thing and still be fine. I have seen some truly ugly stuff in production yet the customers seemed happy. (though there were probably some chronically sleepless engineers keeping it alive, which sucks and shouldn't happen) I don't like microservices because of how poorly they're usually implemented by default. But at the same time, even poorly implemented microservices give some great benefits (more rapid/agile work, reusability, separation of concerns, BU independence), even if you're struggling against some harmful aspects.