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There is a subset of Spanish companies where this doesn't happen and it's actually frowned upon. But it's a specific network of (successful) companies, And you've got to know where to apply - if you choose a company at random, it's very likely it's going to be like you described.

I think it has to do with where the money is in our society. Investors and founders are very unlikely to have technical knowledge or be involved with technical people, so their mindset is that they are hiring people to tell them what to do like you'd hire workers to reform your house - they don't want their input, they want "muscle" to do the job.

Then the company grows in sort of a two layer structure, with the product guys at the top being completely ignorant of tech and the engineers below following orders. The result is usually a toxic environment where engineers group against leadership who are perceived as idiotic slavers.

Engineer culture is partly to blame as well. Tech people have pretty easy access to a job market that's quite good compared to the rest of the country, but there's quite a lot of cultural friction against people leaving a job to improve their conditions - there's a mentality that known evils are better than jumping into the unknown. So leadership has little incentive to change.

Do you think this has something to do with traditional Spanish culture? Ex-Spanish colonies are also notoriously led from the top down, and I read an interesting theory that the reason the Aztecs were so easily assimilated vs indigenous North Americans is their rigidly hierarchical organization allowed the Spanish to essentially hot swap themselves into power.

there's also the whole racism thing. north american settlers basically wanted nothing to do with the natives, except to claim their territory. we have a folktale of the one time a white guy and a native girl got together and it was "a big disaster". latin america has its own racism problems, but there was way more race mixing which is probably a more important diver of assimilation than who controls the power.

I think it has to do with culture, but not in the way you suggest. Up until the mid seventies, Spain suffered a dictatorship that followed a bloody civil war. That means that for decades society had very little social mobility and a lot of cronyism. Scientists, artists and intellectuals in general were purged during the war, looked down upon later, and the inherent censorship and closeness of authoritarian governments made the country culturally barren.

Many decades have passed since then, and nowadays Spain is of course a fully developed democracy, but the remains of that society still exist. It is present for example in the value given to stable jobs by the low-middle class, where people basically assume a glass ceiling - "why take risks changing jobs or try to start a business? You don't have the contacts nor the money anyway".

The lack of people with technical backgrounds in the upper class is also very evident: In the US you'll find many engineers that later went for an MBA and moved into leadership positions, and many companies have engineers as founders. Here, business administration is a career, not a masters degree, and for people who graduate in such programs, it is assumed that they already have the money or the connections to start their careers already in a leadership position - they practically choose "boss" as their job description, so to speak.

As an Spanish guy currently working in Japan... if you think Spain is very top-down, the meetings are endless, and employee satisfaction is low, I can tell you it can get much worse. If I didn't have a Japanese girlfriend, I would go back without thinking twice.

As the old saying goes, we don't value what we have until we lose it. Although on the other hand, I left because I was tired of asshole bosses...

> Architects, Technical Directors, and the like barely override any team decision if at all.

I would be interested to see how the products turn out in the long run, when the team decides on architecture A but the company as a whole bets on architecture B, e.g. the team likes AWS but the company wants to use Azure.

That is a very interesting point, and it is solved in negotiations between the teams. One team cannot use a technology that forces another team to change theirs. That will take away the autonomy of one of the teams.

e.g.

If one team decides to use Protocol Buffers for their public APIs instead of HTTP/JSON that is the standard, that needs to be discussed at a higher level. As that decision forces other teams to change their tech-stack, one team cannot make that change unilaterally.

If the team's application is composed by several micro-services and they want to use Protocol Buffers for their private/internal APIs, that is not a concern for anyone else.

The directors or architects will be arbiter of the discussion to make sure that it is taken fast and everybody opinion is weighted in. And, if the end there is no agreement, then the director will take the decision to keep things moving.

The main downside of this approach is when a team changes project and ownership of the code changes hands. In that situation you get a tech-stack that you may not find attractive. Usually the team will end changing that tech-stack to something they are more comfortable with, but it takes a long time.

There's a joke in the US: "A camel is a horse that was designed by committee."

Of course, camels are pretty cool. If you read Pratchett, they are the world's greatest mathematicians.

But they ain't horses.

There's a lot to be said for a single, focused, experienced, architectural "czar."

As to how much leeway the team is to be given, I think the jury is still out, and I'll bet it depends on corporate, or local societal, culture.

Team overhead is a big deal. The more leeway and autonomy that is given to the team, the more overhead is required to maintain the product focus and lifecycle.

But it can well be worth it, if the team is comprised of experienced craftspeople. Less so, if it is mostly junior-level folks, who need to "stay in their lanes."

I am not a fan of "One Law to Rule Them All, and In the Darkness Bind Them" rules. Every team, and even every project, will have many factors that will inform the structure, overhead, deliverables, quality, future maintenance, etc.

I think rather than a single person, you want exactly two people who have to agree on something to make a decision; and if you can't get to a decision, it's probably a sign you need to solve other problems first.

That way, there's someone who can challenge your opinion and you have to convince them to agree with it or find an alternative. Often during the convincing part you identify issues that you wouldn't have thought of by yourself, and since you don't have ultimate authority by yourself, you're less likely to unintentionally shut up someone who wants to disagree but defers to authority.

Very good point.

There would be some sort of process for coming to a decision on choices that have broad impact. The same way there would be a process within a team when different individuals disagree on direction.

The problem with a top down approach is that the architect doesn't actually know what is actually needed by teams. They're too far removed from the day to day. So you get a uniform but generally suboptimal set of technologies.

They did say "barely". I'd imagine "we want AWS just because" would be one of those scenarios.

The rest of it doesn't have to be an explicit override, but asking the team for clarification: "You've spec'd out A but we do have B that is similar, is there something missing from B that you need?"

my Spanish coworkers are in other countries like Ireland because they say the pay is too low at home.

Ireland has higher pay, but not necessarily better management, or even quality of life (at a typical developer's wage). Ironically Spain's workforce is full of Argentinians for the same reason the Spanish want to work in Ireland.

And where are the Irish?

There's a lot of international companies setup in Dublin due to the beneficial corporate tax rates available to them, which then creates a lot of jobs. Cue immigration to Dublin.

we have Argentinians in Dublin too. they were previously in Spain.