About At Ground Level
Technology failures get explained twice. There’s the version in the incident report, which names a component. And there’s the version people tell each other afterward, which names a decision made a year earlier by someone who never touched that component.
At Ground Level is about the second version.
The argument this blog keeps returning to is that technology problems are usually organizational problems wearing a technical mask. The outage is real. The root cause analysis is accurate as far as it goes. But the failure started upstream—in an incentive, an escalation path, a staffing decision, an architecture chosen to satisfy a procurement cycle rather than a workload. Fix the component and you have fixed the symptom. The mechanism is still there, and it will produce something else.
Ground level is where that becomes visible. Not in the strategy deck, and not in the postmortem summary that goes to the executive committee, but at two in the morning with the bridge line open, when the system is telling you the truth about how it was actually built.
What You’ll Find Here
Four categories. Systems Under Stress is failure propagation, unseen dependencies, and the structural weakness that only appears when something is pushed past its design assumptions. Organizational Reality is how organizations function beneath the theory—incentives, decision latency, and communication breakdown. Technology and Consequence is second-order effects: AI, automation, and platform decisions examined through what they produced rather than what they promised. Lessons from the Machine is the pattern recognition—what repeats across systems no matter how new we insist the current one is.
One piece a week, Tuesday mornings.
Who’s Writing This
I’m James Nerlinger. I came up as an engineer on servers and networks, and spent thirty years in enterprise infrastructure without ever fully leaving the console.
The path ran engineering, then managing both the server and the network sides, then major incident management, then back to the network. Along the way I took the VPNs and the load balancers personally—F5 work, switches, routers. In management I ran teams through seventy- and eighty-hour weeks and stayed hands-on the entire time, which is not the standard arrangement and was not always welcome.
That history buys a particular kind of skepticism. I have sat through enough incidents where the network was blamed and the network was innocent to be suspicious of any explanation that arrives before the evidence does.
The management record is real as well: director-level roles at Atos, formerly Siemens IT Solutions, with account responsibility for Fortune 500 clients including Disney, MetLife, McGraw-Hill Education, and Harrah’s Casinos. But credentials are not what this blog runs on. It runs on having been in the room when the thing broke, and knowing the difference between an explanation that closes a ticket and an explanation that is true.
More of My Work
At Ground Level is one of several things I write and build.
The Blogs…
Many Lamps, One Flame—Torah, philosophy, and the contemplative work. Interfaith writing without a denomination to defend.
One More Beat—Living with a transplanted heart. The medical account, told candidly.
Rogue Wayfarer—Places, people, and what turned up along the way. Written slowly and without a map.
Rooted Hearth—Real food, practical living, and the quiet work of keeping a house in order. Coming soon.
The Software…
Deep Dark Abyss Productions—Independent software for iOS and macOS. No ads, no subscriptions, no nonsense.
Everything Else…
Infobin—General bio, background, and the full picture of what I do.
Getting in Touch
Consulting inquiries, speaking engagements, corrections, or an argument with something I’ve written: jnj@atgroundlevel.com. I read everything. I answer most of it.