Not only that, but unfortunately they are usually right. Without oversight the in-house team has high likelihood of building NIH spaghetti, which causes more problems down the line. To avoid the negative outcome leadership needs to be technically competent and resourced, and that's the other side of the coin - usually they don't have the expertise so in a way they also do not trust themselves to lead the project to a positive outcome.
I think when you see this you need to start digging deeper and questioning why this is happening.
Is it because the "grunts" are genuinely bad at their jobs? If this is the case, then who hired them?
Or is it because they have been conditioned to believe that if they ask for permission to use an outside tool/library/etc, they will be told "no, we don't have the budget for that" or "that has to go through 12 layers of approval" or "great idea! we'll get it into a committee to talk about the best way to implement it and get back to you (in 6-12 months)"?
In other words: Are they building NIH spaghetti not because they lack oversight, but because they have too much, that hampers them from actually doing their damn jobs?
The important customer wants just one tiny convenience-feature that fits their use case and it sorta makes sense... Which somehow keeps scope-creeping over time into a cancerous unplanned product which is expensive to support.
With the benefit of hindsight, you realize it's something the customer should have bought directly for themselves from a completely separate and more-qualified vendor. However they either didn't realize what they wanted or they were able to trick you into building an over-specialized product for their use case--for much cheaper than if they had hired a contractor to customize another better offering.
This message encapsulates why so many software jobs are terrible. Put your heart and soul into doing your best, earnestly combat NIH and pursue meaningful productivity, and _still_ the culture is such that at many companies, there will never be trust because the prevailing culture is that management is "usually right" that grunts can't be trusted.
I've worked for good bosses that aren't like this, but they're hard to find.
If you were to allow everyone to innovate freely, some would spend several weeks learning the latest shiny fad and creating things of no or negative value, like using AI to generate commit messages or adding service mesh to your single container kubernetes cluster. The disconnect from business value and writing code for the sake of writing code can be astonishing. Conversely, if you let loose one smart guy in the team, it may seem unfair to the rest of the team.
A good leader is the one who balances the need and utilizes the best of both these sides.
And I'm cynical all right. I used to believe that I could be part of a "we're all in this together" team. But I've realized how rare that is after bad experiences at multiple companies where management sees an antagonistic relationship with engineering as inevitable — because they agree with you that "grunts can't be trusted".
Trust from management isn’t all that is needed for good work to be accomplished, good managers of software development also should not shockingly know good software development.
I swear software and tech related roles are one of the few places where the managers don’t also know how to do the job of their reports.
Signed, a greybeard sick of cleaning up messes.