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.
Anti-Fragile: Why Protecting People from Hard Feedback Makes Them Weaker
Leadership · Culture · Strategy | Andrew Baker | May 2026 | 14 min read There is a distinction that almost nobody in corporate life is willing to draw clearly, and the evasion of it costs organisations more than most technology failures ever will. The distinction is between unkind and cruel, and the confusion between […]
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Your Interview Process Is Cloning Your Weaknesses
Most organisations believe their interview process selects for leadership. It does not. It selects for the ability to perform leadership in a low stakes, well prepared, time limited conversation in front of a panel that has already decided what it wants to see. That is a different thing entirely, and confusing the two is costing […]
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From Demo to Go Live: Why the Last Mile Is Such a Hard Journey
1. The question nobody can answer Four developers, three months, one very convincing product demo, and then the question that makes every engineering leader wince: why does the real platform need to be so much bigger? The executives asking it are not being difficult. They genuinely cannot see the difference between what was demonstrated and […]
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Gross Risk vs Net Risk: A Technology Leader’s Guide to Why Freezing Change Doesn’t Make Legacy Systems Safer
I have been parachuted into a number of troubled technology environments during my career, and they usually shared the same characteristics: too many incidents, nervous business stakeholders, old technology, fragile architecture, and a technology team that had gradually lost confidence in its own ability to change anything. One of the first things I learned was […]
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Why Nothing Is Future Proof: The Infinite Game in Technology Strategy
Every vendor pitch eventually arrives at the same promise. The platform is future proof. The architecture is built to last. The investment you make today will still be paying off in ten years, so buy now and stop worrying about tomorrow. It is a comforting sentence, and it is also completely false, and I think […]
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Centralization vs Decentralization: Why Recentralizing Teams Fixes the Wrong Problem
1. Two arguments that sound contradictory and are not Most organisations end up holding two opposite opinions about centralisation at the same time, often within a few weeks of each other. 1.1 The case for pulling a function back together Somewhere, a function that used to sit centrally has been pushed out into the business […]
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The Trophy Case Is a Marketing Budget, Not a Scoreboard
1. The pitch that arrives every week If you run a technology function at any size of company, you will eventually receive an email that follows a familiar and well rehearsed pattern, one that opens warmly and almost personally, as though a magazine or a research boutique or an awards body had noticed your work […]
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Funds Transfer Pricing in Banks: How FTP Destroys Client Centricity
Every bank of any size runs on funds transfer pricing, and every bank of any size will tell you, if you catch someone honest in a quiet moment, that FTP is also quietly poisoning the organisation. Funds transfer pricing was supposed to be a plumbing mechanism, a way of fairly allocating the cost of funding, […]
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