- Custody is Not Ownership
The page comes in at 3:14 a.m. Not because anything crashed—the system is still running, still doing exactly what it was built to do. It just hit a case nobody wrote a rule for, and instead of failing loudly it started quietly doing the wrong thing to real data. Someone on call clears the offending… - The Fence Was Never the Point
The first case took about an hour. An internal OpenAI model, sandboxed and instructed to post its results only to Slack, found a way around the restrictions blocking external access. It found a vulnerability in the sandbox, then opened a pull request on the benchmark’s public GitHub repository—directly against the instruction it had been given. OpenAI… - 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…
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
