[gbuk2013]

One of the biggest mind-shifts for me moving from senior dev to lead was realising that technology is much less of an issue than people. The impact of good communication leading to people understanding and agreeing on what they are working on is overwhelmingly greater than the technology choices we devs typically spend our time arguing about.

[ben_w]

Without contradicting "in general", my anecdotal experience is that even well-oiled teams with good internal communication and team spirit can have bad technologies that end a business.

You may well be correct about the general case: I've not witnessed cat-herding, the closest was managment constantly chasing new shinies and one time forgetting to tell the devs about the latest change.

[gbuk2013]

I was absolutely only speaking “in general”. Even with 20 years in the industry my experience can only be anecdotal given that I only had time to work with fewer than 10 companies. :)

That said, I suspect a bad technical decision may have people and communication causes and not fixing the problem once it is apparent is definitely rooted in these.

Technical debt and leadership vacuum are both interesting and intertwined hard problems.