[JKCalhoun]

It is accurate in my experience.

We had "team (tech) leads" in the old days that took the place of marketing more or less — setting the general course for the software as a whole, the architecture as a whole.

But each engineer was given their own sandbox, their own piece of the framework/app to own. "Go implement an image cache."

Image cache engineer got to style their code however they pleased. They could tear it up and rewrite it when there was excessive technical debt. They knew it inside and out since they wrote it.

Often if it was code they inherited they would end up rewriting it eventually regardless — maybe piecemeal.

I don't remember every having code reviews. Sanity check? Sure, when there was some tricky bit of hacking required.

Yes, QA. Unit tests seem to make management happy these days. "I want to see 85% coverage!" as though that magically means we have less bugs.