What "authority"? Different people have different roles. If I know tons about implementing caches, I probably end up making most of the decisions about that so

What "authority"? Different people have different roles. If I know tons about implementing caches, I probably end up making most of the decisions about that sort of thing. If you know a lot about scheduling projects, probably you'll end up doing a lot of that. A junior person probably won't get to make a lot of decisions, except in whatever rather small area they are contributing in. And so on. Management doesn't mean you are an authority, it just means you have different responsibilities (and I manage as well as develop, I don't write this solely as a developer). We can all come up with counterexamples to the above. What if someone is not pulling their weight? What if a group decides to drink (heavily) at the job? And so on. Sure, at some point somebody needs to make decisions about hire/fire/probation, and so on, but the hope and desire is to build a team that self directs itself in as much as that is possible. I don't know, the whole 'authority' thing comes off as weird to me.