Comment by torben-friis | Hacker News Reader

Comment by torben-friis | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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.

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.

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