- Hired to Disagree
You bring in a contractor. You vetted them properly—checked the work, checked the references, paid for the engagement because they know something you don’t. Partway through the project, they tell you something you don’t like. Not incompetence, not evasion—a clear, confident recommendation that runs against your own instinct for how this should go. You’re now… - The Requirements List is Measuring the Wrong Thing
A requirements list for a senior automation engineer role: five-plus years of hands-on scripting in a specific language, production experience writing complex automation from scratch, deep fluency in a toolchain assembled sometime around 2018. It reads like a bar. It functions like a filter. Somewhere in the last few years, without anyone updating the document,… - Technical Debt is Usually Leadership Debt
Every organization has one. The legacy system everyone complains about. The one engineers quietly dread touching because every change risks breaking something nobody fully understands anymore. Leadership refers to it casually—we really need to modernize that platform. Somewhere in the conversation, someone says the phrase technical debt. Usually with the same implication: engineering let this… - Experience Is Becoming a Competitive Advantage Again
For nearly a decade, the technology industry quietly convinced itself that experience had become optional. Move fast. Disrupt everything. Hire younger. Break old systems before someone older tells you why they were built that way in the first place. Institutional memory became something to replace rather than something to preserve. New data suggests that bet… - AI Will Not Fix Broken Organizations
Over the next three years, a remarkable number of organizations are going to spend millions implementing AI. Many of them will quietly discover they misunderstood the assignment from the beginning. The problem won’t be the technology. It will be the organization itself. The thing nobody wants to say out loud AI does not fix broken…
About James Nerlinger
James Nerlinger is an enterprise technology executive with 30+ years of experience in global infrastructure operations, managed services leadership, major incident management, and technical consulting. His career has included director-level roles at Atos (formerly Siemens IT Solutions), where he held account responsibility for Fortune 500 clients including Disney, MetLife, McGraw-Hill Education, and Harrah’s Casinos.
He is also the founder of Deep Dark Abyss Productions, an independent software studio, and the author of the interfaith theological blog Many Lamps, One Flame and the memoir One More Beat.
At Ground Level is where he writes about technology, organizations, and what happens when they interact under pressure.
Contact Me
For consulting inquiries, speaking engagements, or general correspondence:
jnj@atgroundlevel.com
