I think being a tech lead in a flat organization is more of a matter of being the techy that other techies want to talk to. Sure, those other people aren't your direct reports... but there are still plenty of leadership and mentor opportunities.
That's what is called "leadership without (formal) authority." If you are knowledgeable, helpful and approachable, your teammates will naturally gravitate toward you when they are in need of guidance. This sort of organic leadership is in many ways much more valuable than the artificial leadership provided by formal, top-down authority.
The last 2 jobs have been "We're flat here. No team leaders, senior or junior devs." but there are clearly people that take on more responsibility and are more experienced than others.
If you wanted to practice command and control, that is difficult in flat organizations. If you wanted to practice impress and influence, there is no better place. Impress and influence is a lot harder, because instead of just convincing one less technical person, you have to convince every technical person.
I have found striving to impress and influence has caused me to become a much better developer and communicator. I've also seen a lot of developers come, say a few smart things to the boss, and sit back expecting to be given a team to boss around. They often don't currently possess the skills or communication abilities to convince any technical people, and rather than work on those, they go elsewhere to find a team where they can be unjustly rewarded.
Nah, "impress and influence" should be a super-rare thing for actually organizing a team. Individuals can be impressed by one another, but in software development everybody has their own strong opinion on what is good and what is bad, so it is next to impossible to come to a consensus.
Really, just try collecting a group of people and discussing who they think is a great developer and why.
By the way, I have been that person who was promoted from a team of peers.
That is fine, many companies have teams so used to command and control it would be impossible to change that without changing them. I am a dev manager who doesn't use command and control, knowing full well that my teams will self structure themselves around the business needs. To their credit, they are all seasoned at self organization, so come to consensus quickly, and would do so with or without me.
I'm not sure what I would do if everyone on the team was passive and expecting orders, I think that wouldn't be a very good match for our styles.
Personally I am skeptical of self-organizing teams because I have had strictly negative experiences with them as a developer.
It seems that having a self-organizing team of evenly qualified and experienced professionals is probably almost guaranteed to work, but 'working' does not mean 'optimal'.
I am almost certain that when self-organization works, command and control would still work better if you put the right person in charge.
Still, I do not think that command and control is the absolute optimal form of organization. It seems to me that true self-organization requires a number of very special ingredients that maybe the humankind is yet to discover.
Just simply declaring self-organization will lead to more or less disorganization. A disorganized team will not necessarily fail though. It depends on a number of conditions, such as the complexity of the project, the qualifications of the team, time/budget pressure, etc. If the team's proficiency greatly exceeds the project's complexity, then probably any form of organization will do.
A reasonable disorganization is probably what is actually being exploited under the buzzword of so called 'self-organization'.
There are many types of leader and a flat organisation just means that you won't get to be a "type 1" leader, or an imposed leader if you will. That doesn't mean you can't rise to the position using skills and personality.
If you really want to go for leadership in your career look up some courses and books on the subject and talk to a mentor or even HR about developing a career plan.
Ideally, people are paid what they are worth - so that would imply there would be instances where people had the same title, but vastly different pay. The challenge always seems to be how to reliably determine who is really having more impact and who is positioning themselves to look like they are.
If you want to work in a more structured environment, look for larger engineering organizations born in the last 20th century. There are tradeoffs, of course.
