Most Return-to-Office Mandates Fail Because the Office Was Never Designed for the People Returning
by: Anthony S. JacksonPublished on: 07/07/2026Return-to-office is only defensible when the environment is fully colocated, designed by the technical workforce itself, and proven by near-zero turnover. Almost no company qualifies.
Engineering Manager Burnout Is an Architecture Problem
by: Anthony S. JacksonPublished on: 03/07/2026Engineering manager burnout is not a personal failure or a resilience problem. It is a design problem: the manager became the operating system instead of building one. Every decision that routes through you, every question that waits for your...
The Organizations That Call Management Overhead Have Already Decided Who Doesn't Matter
by: Anthony S. JacksonPublished on: 01/07/2026The pattern is consistent enough to be a design. A technically excellent individual contributor gets promoted into management because they were the best at the work.
Every Team Has an Operating System. Most New Leaders Never Read It.
by: Anthony S. JacksonPublished on: 30/06/2026A few years ago I walked into an org that was flat in the wrong places, decisions ran through informal nodes, and the team had long since learned to work around its constraints rather than through them.