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 An engineering budget gets approved when every line names an owner, a unit of measure, and a date. Finance rarely rejects the work itself. It rejects requests it cannot audit, rank against a sales hire, or defend to a board. Twenty-five years in and I have … Read more
By Kris Drouet, Engineering Executive, in partnership with KORE1 Selling tech debt to executives fails because the phrase names four unrelated problems at once. Split it into security exposure, delivery cost, key-person risk, and a growth ceiling, then bring the one your CFO already funds. I have watched the same request get denied and then … Read more
By Kris Drouet, Engineering Executive, in partnership with KORE1 AI code review works for engineering teams when a VP assigns a named human owner to every risk tier, sets a review SLA the team tracks weekly, and reserves final judgment for changes touching trust boundaries, money, or production access. That’s the entire operating model in … Read more
By Kris Drouet, Engineering Executive, in partnership with KORE1 Buy the vendor’s AI for the seventy percent every lender needs, document intake, underwriting signals, compliance logging, and build custom only at the one exception queue that is actually yours. Most engineering leaders pick one extreme or the other. The pattern that actually works sits in … Read more
By Kris Drouet, Engineering Executive, in partnership with KORE1 Fintech engineering teams keep velocity through an audit by making evidence a byproduct of the pipeline, tiering changes by risk instead of reviewing everything equally, and documenting a break-glass path before they need it. Three patterns. I have shipped under all three, auditors have signed off … Read more
By Kris Drouet, Engineering Executive, in partnership with KORE1 A synchronous call inside an event-driven system costs you the product of every dependency’s availability, the worst tail latency anywhere in the chain, and the retry load of every client sitting above it. Three numbers. You can compute all three in an afternoon from data you … Read more
By Kris Drouet, Engineering Executive, in partnership with KORE1 An estimate becomes an informed commitment when it names its assumptions, carries a range instead of one date, and comes with a standing right to renegotiate scope the moment an assumption breaks. An aspirational guess carries none of that. It carries a date and a hope. … Read more
By Kris Drouet, Engineering Executive, in partnership with KORE1 Your best engineers cannot reliably evaluate an AI vendor demo, because the demo is a controlled performance and their own judgment about AI is measurably unreliable. In a 2025 randomized trial, experienced developers ran 19% slower with AI tools while believing they had run 20% faster. … Read more
BMW is cutting roughly 8,000 office and development jobs in Germany by the end of 2027. Here is what the German automotive retrenchment actually means for US engineering hiring.
By Kris Drouet, Engineering Executive, in partnership with KORE1 Coaching a new engineering manager works when you name the specific behavior, hand back the decision they are avoiding, and set a check-in date. A postmortem explains why someone failed. A coaching conversation happens early enough to change the outcome. The gap between those two meetings … Read more
