Engineering

By Kris Drouet, Engineering Executive, in partnership with KORE1 Engineering organizations grow afraid to refactor legacy code when years of small, reasonable changes pile up into load-bearing spaghetti, where every piece is quietly holding up another and nobody can predict what a fix will break. The fear is rational, not weak. It is an information … Read more

By Kris Drouet, Engineering Executive, in partnership with KORE1 An Encompass integration realistically takes four to six months and costs well past the vendor quote, because certification, field mapping, event re-architecture, and testing against a real loan file are never inside the number you are shown. The six-to-eight-week figure from a sales cycle prices a … Read more

By Kris Drouet, Engineering Executive, in partnership with KORE1 A promoted IC usually needs two to three quarters to find real footing as an engineering manager, and closer to a year before the team feels it. Washing out runs on a faster clock. You can lose a team in a single quarter, and that asymmetry … Read more

By Kris Drouet, Engineering Executive, in partnership with KORE1 An engineering manager becomes the bottleneck when nothing ships without their review, their approval, or their opinion. The fix is not learning to move faster through the queue. It is moving decisions out of your head and into a system your team can run without you. … Read more

By Kris Drouet, Engineering Executive, in partnership with KORE1 Replacing a tangle of point-to-point integrations with a Kafka pub/sub backbone cut our downstream processing latency by 45 percent, removed the bottlenecks that made every change risky, and let the platform absorb peak transaction volume without falling over. This is the actual migration, the parts that … Read more

By Kris Drouet, Engineering Executive, in partnership with KORE1 Engineering priorities have to live in writing because a decision made in a hallway reaches maybe four people, changes without a trace, and leaves every engineer who missed it building toward a target that quietly moved. That is the hallway-decision problem, and it is the second … Read more

A build vs buy framework is a short, repeatable test for deciding whether to build a capability in-house or rent it from a vendor. Mine runs on five numbers. If your team cannot put those numbers on the table, you are not ready to make the call yet. A few years back I sat in … Read more

Engineering career progression runs through three stages, Builder, Leader, and Advisor, and your authority compounds across them instead of replacing them. You earn the right to lead by building first, and the right to advise by staying close enough to the build that nobody can sell you a story you can’t check. A senior engineer … Read more

The best engineering leaders stay technical. The myth that good leaders eventually outgrow the code is one of the most expensive ideas in tech, and here is why.