Engineering Economics

Why organisations spend millions replacing engineers who could have been retained for thousands. The full economic cost of attrition, decomposed across six budget categories.

Interview processes systematically reject qualified candidates. Trial-based hiring produces 71% more successful hires while costing $30M less annually at scale.

A VP of Engineering measured new engineer productivity for three months. The CFO estimated $800K annual cost. The reality was $6.5M. How to compress the ramp from twelve months to seven.

A company's deployment frequency showed 10x improvement. The actual deployment count had not changed. When metrics become targets, they stop being good metrics.

A database query went from 200ms to 50ms. Three hours later, system throughput dropped 80%. How local optimisation destroys global performance.

A payment processor fixed a critical bug that had throttled their system for 18 months. Downstream services collapsed within hours. Sometimes the most dangerous thing is making your code work perfectly.

Two startups, similar funding, competing products. One chose cutting-edge technology. The other chose Rails and Postgres. Five years later, the boring stack had won decisively.

A weekly architecture meeting everyone complained about prevented $500,000 in incidents. The counterintuitive economics of coordination versus execution.