[doctor_fact]

This article starts with "We don't need a tech lead". Which may be true.

It then veers into "You don't need a tech lead". Which I don't think is true.

I am a greybeard by HN standards. I have worked on teams of highly competent developers where there was no tech lead. They failed badly - the lack of both the design consistency from a single source (a literal 'chief builder') and there being no final arbiter. Disagreements lingered to the extent of, in one case, man overboard. Turns out Architectural Consistency is important.

In my latter days I'm occasionally called upon to 'sort out' what's going wrong in particular businesses, often with developers at the 'less good' end of the spectrum. And I can say that in many of these cases the absence of (or, more usually, the lack of competence in) the technical lead is often the root cause of many of the project ills. It can be as if the entire product is cast adrift on whatever technology and technical debt built up from years past.

There are huge flocks of software engineering that barely know "the web is a thing", let alone how to move the herd in a consistent direction.

So if you have a team that's functional anarchy (or meritocracy, if you prefer) - great! Count yourself lucky.

But it is unusual.