[friendzis]

I see one major flaw in reasoning in this post: trust.

Lets pretend that architects are under team leads, seniors under architects, juniors under seniors, etc.. In this hierarchical model every layer forwards some responsibilities down the chain and trusts the task to be broken down, distributed further down and completed. In this model code reviews function merely as tools to roughly check for gaping mistakes and whether code fits "architecturally". People are trusted to do their job to the best of their ability and are allowed to have personal style.

In a model where seniors go over everything juniors made, fix according to their own view and then commit we have a problems that lower layers are not trusted to do their job correctly and in the end everything has to strictly conform to product owner's vision or will be "fixed" (rewritten). In this model there are no longer junior, mid-level, senior engineers, because the more minions one has under them, the less time they have to produce anything on their own. In this model there are junior, mid, senior code-monkeys and one mighty product owner who knows it all best. Not sure that environment where only career growth opportunity is ability to rewrite other's code to your own liking would be good for team morality.

[pjmlp]

You just described enterprise consulting with outsource/offshored projects.