Mike Carter
By Mike Carter, Managing Director, KORE1 Plan 2027 headcount at a higher hurdle rate, because the Fed raised its target range to 3.75 to 4 percent in September and most FOMC participants expect another increase by year end. Investment-grade borrowing costs now run 5.99 percent, up 121 basis points in a year. The practical effect … Read more
By Mike Carter, Managing Director, KORE1 Good financial analyst interview questions in 2026 make the candidate push one number through all three statements, explain a budget miss to someone outside finance, and own a forecast they got wrong. Definitions can be memorized the night before. Those three can’t. A building-products distributor in Sacramento learned this … Read more
By Mike Carter, Managing Director, KORE1 Schneider Electric’s $22.6 billion deal for PTC won’t change who you hire for Creo and Windchill until it closes, expected by Q3 2027, but it makes engineers who connect product data to factory operations more valuable starting now. The day-to-day software stays the same for a while. The market … Read more
By Mike Carter, Managing Director, KORE1 Strong director of product interview questions in 2026 test how a candidate splits a fixed engineering budget, what their org stopped building, and how they develop PMs, rather than whether they can design a product on a whiteboard. Product sense still matters at this level. It’s just the price … Read more
By Mike Carter, Managing Director, KORE1 A COO job description should list the functions moving to the seat, the three or four operating numbers it will be judged on, and the dollar amounts it can approve without the CEO. On our searches a private or mid-market COO’s base falls between $175,000 and $400,000, and bonus … Read more
By Mike Carter, Managing Director, KORE1 A chief revenue officer job description should print the revenue the seat inherits, the growth target, the size of the quota-carrying team, the sales motion, and what variable pay is measured on. On the searches we work, base runs $250,000 to $400,000 and variable is close to half of … Read more
By Mike Carter, Managing Director, KORE1 SOW misclassification is staff augmentation bought on a statement of work: named people, directed by your managers, billed by the hour against timesheets. No industry dataset tells you how much of your SOW spend it covers. You get that number by auditing your own ledger. Three numbers are going … Read more
By Mike Carter, Managing Director, KORE1 Worker misclassification penalties in 2026 depend on the state: 28 states and the District of Columbia have a fine written for misclassification, from $200 per worker in Texas to $50,000 per employee in Colorado, while 21 have none. Federal back taxes and wage claims apply everywhere on top of … Read more
By Mike Carter, Managing Director, KORE1 A chief AI officer job description must spell out the reporting line, the AI budget the seat controls, which deployment decisions it can approve or stop without a vote, and the regulations it answers for. Base pay in our salary guide runs $280,000 to $400,000 at mid-market companies and … Read more
By Mike Carter, Managing Director, KORE1 Most Guidewire developers in the U.S. are paid $110,000 to $140,000 base at mid-level in 2026 and $140,000 to $175,000 at senior, and technical architects go from $170,000 to $215,000. The averages you find online disagree by about $40,000, because each one is quietly measuring a different group of … Read more
