Brandt Welker · Essays
Thirty years building systems people's lives depend on — at NASA, at the VA, and in the software that runs hospitals.
I'm a healthcare technology executive who writes about how these systems actually work: where the incentives point, why good engineering is mostly subtraction, and what changes — and what doesn't — when the tools get smarter.
Steidle's Law
An admiral who ran the Joint Strike Fighter fly-off taught me one rule about politics: every two years, hand the people who funded you a win they can take credit for. Miss the cadence and a better plan loses to a good one that delivers.
Start here
If you're new, start with these five.
- 01
Building 30
Thanks to an office remodel, I spent September 11th in Mission Control, the one room built so somebody can read a signal and know what it means. My wife called me twice that day, and I misread both calls.
- 02
Moravec Inverted: 500 Million Years of Pretraining
The things that feel effortless, like seeing, walking, and knowing who's in the room, feel easy because they're the most optimized things you have. Evolution was the pretraining, and the machines inherited the wrong five thousand years of it.
- 03
The Denial Machine
One in five claims gets denied on the first pass. A system that says no to a fifth of everything is not making mistakes. It is doing what it was built to do.
- 04
Absorbing Scope Teaches the Org That Scope Is Free
Every unpriced "can you also" teaches people that change costs nothing, and every role you refuse to fund ends up built on whoever is standing closest. You can keep saying yes. Just stop hiding the bill.
- 05
Accountability Is Made of Witnesses and Dates
The same commitment turns into a different thing depending on who was in the room when it got made. And the kind move, it turns out, is giving someone a date they can actually hit.