Engineering staffing insights covering mechanical, electrical, biomedical, and systems engineering roles — including hiring trends, salary data, and strategies for building R&D, manufacturing, and product development teams.
By Kris Drouet, Engineering Executive, in partnership with KORE1 Communicating with executives about engineering work means restating it in the four units a board already uses, which are revenue, cost, risk, and time, and putting the decision you need in the first sentence. The board isn’t going to learn your vocabulary. Theirs is short, and … Read more
By Kris Drouet, Engineering Executive, in partnership with KORE1 Schema evolution is how an event’s structure changes over time without breaking the services that read it, and doing it without downtime means pairing registry compatibility checks with a known consumer list and an expand, migrate, contract rollout. The registry catches broken shapes. It can’t catch … Read more
By Kris Drouet, Engineering Executive, in partnership with KORE1 Compliance automation means your delivery systems generate audit evidence as they run, with each control writing a timestamped, tamper-proof record from the system of record and a daily check flagging any control that failed. Collecting that evidence is the easy half. Proving to an auditor that … Read more
By Kris Drouet, Engineering Executive, in partnership with KORE1 An on-call rotation that keeps burning people out is usually reporting an architecture problem, because pages cluster at the seams where services are tightly coupled, and adding engineers to the schedule divides that load without reducing it. Total page volume is a design number. Per-person load … Read more
By Kris Drouet, Engineering Executive, in partnership with KORE1 LLM evaluation is a repeatable scored test suite for model output, run against a fixed set of real examples, so quality becomes a number you can watch instead of a feeling somebody had in a demo. Build it before the feature, not after the incident. Thirty … Read more
By Kris Drouet, Engineering Executive, in partnership with KORE1 A dual engineering career ladder fails when the staff track matches management on pay but hands staff engineers no real decisions, because the title then reads as a consolation prize for engineers who were not chosen to manage. Two MIT researchers documented that failure in 1985. … Read more
By Kris Drouet, Engineering Executive, in partnership with KORE1 Brooks’s law says adding people to a late software project makes it later, because new engineers borrow time from the people already doing the work and every added person multiplies the conversations needed to stay aligned. I call that combined cost the coordination tax. Teams that … Read more
By Kris Drouet, Engineering Executive, in partnership with KORE1 A technical due diligence checklist covers the six areas acquirers actually check, which are architecture, code health, security and open-source licensing, delivery, infrastructure cost, and people risk. The list is predictable. The weighting is not. Most of what changes a price surfaces in the management interviews, … Read more
By Kris Drouet, Engineering Executive, in partnership with KORE1 Choose between onshore, nearshore, and offshore by counting usable overlap hours, not hourly rates, because overlap sets how many decisions your distributed engineering team can close per day. Four to six shared hours is the practical floor for work with unsettled requirements. Below is the row … Read more
By Kris Drouet, Engineering Executive, in partnership with KORE1 Cloud cost optimization is an architecture problem first, because how data moves, what runs idle, how long logs live, and where services split set a cost floor that no discount or rightsizing tool can get beneath. Tools trim the top of the bill. The design decides … Read more
