Engineering Leadership: Hard Truths for Tech Leaders
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Why your best engineers leave, how bad org structures quietly destroy teams, and what separates engineering leaders who scale from those who stall.
Why Core Banking Was a Bad Idea From the Start
A companion piece to Core Banking Is a Terrible Idea. It Always Was. It is 1972. A group of very serious men in very wide ties are gathered in a very beige conference room. They are about to make decisions that will haunt your change advisory board fifty years from now. The following is a […]
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The Last Mile Fallacy: Why Organisations Misvalue Work
1. Introduction Organisations like to believe they reward outcomes. In reality, they reward visibility. This is the essence of the Last Mile Fallacy: the mistaken belief that the final visible step in a chain of work is where most of the value was created. We tip the waiter rather than the chef, praise the presenter […]
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Why Technology Planning Is Fundamentally Dishonest
1. Estimation Fails Exactly Where It Is Demanded Most Estimation is most aggressively demanded in workstreams with the highest discovery, the highest uncertainty, and the highest intellectual property density. This is not an accident. The more uncomfortable the terrain, the more organisations reach for the false comfort of numbers. In these environments, estimation is not […]
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Intelligence vs Wisdom: Why Smart Systems Keep Failing
1. Definitions First (Because This Matters) Intelligence is the ability to acquire knowledge, process information, identify patterns, and solve problems. It answers the question: Can we do this? Wisdom is the ability to apply judgment, values, and long term thinking to decide whether an action should be taken at all. It answers the question: Should […]
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Management vs Leadership: Why Promoting Managers Fails
Management and leadership sound so similar that they are often used interchangeably. True, they are both a sport. But details matter when you want to win. Nowhere is this more visible than in financial services. Banks today do not compete inside a known, stable competitive set. The threat landscape runs from a two-person fintech with […]
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How Agile Lobotomised Teams and Killed Independent Thinking
In One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, the story is set inside a psychiatric institution run not for healing, but for control. The ward is orderly, predictable, and calm on the surface. Patients follow rigid routines. Group therapy sessions exist, but nothing meaningful ever changes. Any behaviour that challenges the system is treated as dangerous. […]
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Leadership Bloat: When Management Consumes the Business
1. The Shoe Planet Problem In The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, there is a planet where the inhabitants become so obsessed with shoes that the shoes eventually take over. The civilisation does not collapse because it lacks intelligence. It collapses because something peripheral accumulates mass until it dominates everything essential. Leadership bloat is the […]
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AI Engineering: How Small Teams Now Build at Scale
I have started writing production code again. Not prototypes. Not proofs of concept. Real systems. Real risk. Real consequences. At Capitec, a very small group of engineers is now tackling something that would historically have demanded hundreds of people: large scale rewrites of core internet banking capabilities. This is not happening because budgets magically increased […]
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Domain Isolation: How It Creates Better Software Architecture
Darwinian Architecture Philosophy How Domain Isolation Creates Evolutionary Pressure for Better Software After two decades building trading platforms and banking systems, I’ve watched the same pattern repeat itself countless times. A production incident occurs. The war room fills. And then the finger pointing begins. “It’s the database team’s problem.” “No, it’s that batch job from […]
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Federation vs Centralisation: Stop Burying Tech Talent
There’s a question that quietly shapes the fate of technology talent in almost every organisation, and most businesses never ask it directly. Instead, they stumble into an answer through a series of incremental org design decisions, budget cycles, and leadership preferences. The question is this: is technology a support function to the business, or is […]
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Corporate Tech Models: Engineer-Led vs Manager-Led
There are two fundamental ways to run technology inside your company (and various states in-between)
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Are You the World’s Worst Tech Leader? Self-Assessment
This is a self assessment. It is not balanced. It is not gentle. It is not here to validate your operating model, your org chart, or the deck you use to reassure executives. It exists to surface how you actually think about technology leadership when pressure arrives and incentives collide with reality. Answer honestly. Not […]
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