Engineering Economics

Three calculation frameworks for quantifying the economic cost of senior engineer departures: minimal (15 minutes), standard (30 minutes), and advanced (with tribal knowledge modelling). Produces defensible numbers suitable for executive presentations.

Use for: Retention business cases, attrition budgeting, comparing intervention costs against replacement costs

Systematic framework for evaluating whether optimisation work is economically justified. Prevents the common failure mode where engineering time optimises components that do not meaningfully constrain system performance.

Use for: Prioritising performance work, building cases against premature optimisation, sprint planning

Twenty-question diagnostic identifying whether engineering metrics are being gamed and quantifying severity. Organised into Detection, Severity, and Culture sections with scoring guides.

Use for: Quarterly metric health checks, dashboard reviews, identifying Goodhart's Law violations

Five-year total cost of ownership model for evaluating technology choices. Covers hiring, productivity, ecosystem, optionality, and risk costs. Includes worked example comparing PostgreSQL versus Cassandra.

Use for: Database selection, language choices, deployment platform decisions, build vs buy analysis

Lightweight framework for tracking coordination failures prevented before they became production incidents. Produces rigorous data for calculating coordination ROI without bureaucratic overhead.

Use for: Measuring incident prevention, justifying coordination investments, team retrospectives

Post-mortem template that captures what standard templates omit: whether anyone saw it coming. Includes prior warning documentation and pattern recognition across incidents.

Use for: Incident reviews, identifying systemic issues, measuring warning signal effectiveness

Measures total hiring costs and compares traditional interview-based hiring against trial-based hiring. Decomposes costs into three categories and reveals economic trade-offs at different company scales.

Use for: Hiring process redesign, comparing recruitment approaches, calculating cost per hire

Quantifies the true cost of engineering onboarding and ROI of ramp acceleration programmes. Measures four distinct cost categories and evaluates interventions systematically.

Use for: Onboarding programme investment cases, measuring ramp time improvements, new hire budgeting