Writing good designs is limited by organizational factors?

[Miriam B.]

Assuming a developer has read and internalized this great book and can write generally good designs in a timely manner, what happens when that developer must work with n other tactical developers?

If the project is brand new, the strategic programmer will produce 10-20% fewer units of output than the tactical programmers, and she will be stymied by the debt the tactical programmers left in their wake.

If the strategic programmer possesses political capital and is able to inspire and influence others, then it is possible for the organization to shift in her favor. Otherwise, though, I'm curious how to frame the natural feeling of hopelessness that can happen when you are the only one who has the knowledge and motivation to address design concerns. Should we be coming up with a better framework for how to influence organizations to take strategic programming more seriously? 

Or perhaps ultimately the power is in the hands of the developers. Professionals have a duty to set the standards and adhere to them without asking for permission. This leads me to think of the reverse scenario: there are n - 1 strategic programmers and 1 single tactical programmer. The tactical programmer has broken the line, intentionally or not, and has made it harder for the rest to adhere to their standards. 

[Jaime Pillora]

I’ve been in this situation and I try to link organisational goals to the long term architecture - finding agreement there isn’t too hard; the hard part is “pausing” the team while a big flip-the-world refactor is taking place. The best thing you can do to combat this is by catching these architectural failures as early as possible, thereby reducing the size of the world to be flipped.

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[Brent Welch]

You need to foster a culture of code review and get the strategic coder squarely in the critical path. It has to be OK to discuss code submissions 

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