Kurakin.pro · note
How to Spot AI-Assisted Cheating in an Interview
How to separate real competence from a polished AI-assisted answer and why interviews should test reasoning rather than police the tools candidates use.
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Articles
Articles, translations, publications hosted elsewhere, and conference talks.
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All articles
Kurakin.pro
Women in Leadership: Business Has Confused Toughness with Strength for Too Long
Why listening, building relationships, and staying firm without performative toughness are becoming essential strengths of modern leadership.
Kurakin.pro · note
CTO Interview Questions That Actually Matter
Questions that reveal decision quality, attitudes to risk, strong engineers, technical debt, and the business rather than memorized terminology.
Kurakin.pro · note
How to Tell an Employee Has Already Decided to Leave
Which changes in engagement, initiative, and planning horizon can signal that someone no longer sees a future for themselves in the company.
Kurakin.pro · note
How a CEO Should Evaluate a CTO
How to evaluate a technology leader through decision quality, predictability, risk management, and organizational strength rather than release counts.
Kurakin.pro · note
Why It Is Dangerous for a Leader to Be the Smartest Person in the Room
How the need to win every discussion gradually removes disagreement, strong specialists, and decision quality from the team.
Kurakin.pro · note
How to Hire a CTO Without Getting It Wrong
Why CTO hiring should start from the business problem and the company's next stage, not famous brands, titles, or a technology checklist.
Kurakin.pro · note
Why 100 AI Agents Can Make a Company Slower
How many independent AI agents create new dependencies, permissions, and accountability, and why unmanaged automation scales complexity.
Kurakin.pro · note
When Is It Time to Replace a CTO?
How to separate temporary conflict from a structural mismatch between the CTO role, the company's new stage, and business needs.
Kurakin.pro · note
How to Tell Whether AI Is Creating Real Business Value
Why users, prompts, and licenses measure activity rather than value, and which business metrics matter instead.
Kurakin.pro · note
What a Legacy System Really Costs
Why legacy costs more than maintenance: change cost, concentrated knowledge, hiring friction, and risk.
Kurakin.pro · note
How to Hire People When AI Writes Resumes and Prepares Interviews
Why polished resumes and confident answers are weaker signals now, and how to test real experience, reasoning, and adaptability instead.
Kurakin.pro · note
How to Delegate Without Losing Control
How to preserve control through outcomes, decision boundaries, checkpoints, and escalation rules instead of constant intervention.
Kurakin.pro · note
When Should a CTO Stop Coding?
When hands-on work helps a CTO and when the technology leader's personal code starts limiting the speed of the organization.
Kurakin.pro · note
The CTO's First 90 Days: What Actually Matters
Why a new CTO should understand the business, people, decision map, and risks before changing architecture, processes, or structure.
Kurakin.pro · note
How to Manage High Performers
Why high performers need meaningful scope, clear expectations, and honest feedback rather than endless extra work.
Kurakin.pro · note
Why Job Interviews Are Starting to Fail
Why predictable interviews increasingly measure interview skill rather than the ability to perform well in the actual job.
Kurakin.pro · note
How to Manage Managers
Why managers cannot be managed as senior individual contributors and how to discuss team outcomes, people, and decision quality instead.
Kurakin.pro · note
CTO vs VP Engineering: What's the Difference?
Where technology strategy ends, engineering management begins, and when one role should become two.
Kurakin.pro · note
AI Saves Time. Why Doesn't the Company See the Savings?
Why personal productivity is not the same as financial impact and what must change for spare capacity to become a business result.
Kurakin.pro · note
Questions a CEO Should Ask the CTO Every Month
What a CEO and CTO should regularly discuss to focus on business outcomes, risks, trade-offs, people, and decisions rather than a task list.
Kurakin.pro · note
Why Bad One-on-Ones Are Worse Than No One-on-Ones
How formal one-on-ones turn into status reporting and teach employees to hide problems instead of raising them earlier.
Kurakin.pro · note
How to Give Negative Feedback
How to discuss a problem directly and respectfully through facts, impact, expectations, and a concrete change in behavior.
Kurakin.pro · note
Why Mandatory AI Use Can Reduce Productivity
Why AI usage KPIs can create activity without value and what leaders should measure instead.
Kurakin.pro · note
Why AI Pilots Stay Pilots
Why a convincing demo still fails to become an operating process and what should be defined before the experiment starts.
Kurakin.pro · note
How to Measure Developer Productivity Without Breaking the Team
Why lines of code, commits, and ticket counts measure activity better than value, and which signals are more useful for engineering organizations.
Kurakin.pro · note
Executive Presence Without the Theater
Why executive presence is clarity and calm in difficult situations rather than voice, posture, or performative toughness.
Kurakin.pro · note
Technical Debt Explained for Business Leaders
A simple explanation of technical debt as the future cost of earlier shortcuts and accumulated complexity.
Kurakin.pro · note
Why Delegation Fails
Why responsibility without authority, taking work back, and punishing independent decisions undermine delegation.
Kurakin.pro · note
Why Developers Write Code Faster but Projects Do Not Speed Up
Why AI speeds up coding without necessarily speeding up the path from decision to outcome when the real bottleneck is somewhere else.
Kurakin.pro · note
The CTO as a Business Leader, Not the Chief Programmer
Why CTO maturity shows up in business decisions, trade-offs, and organizational strength rather than personally solving every hard technical problem.
Kurakin.pro · note
Why Employees Stop Taking Initiative
How approvals, reactions to mistakes, and extra work for proactive people gradually teach strong employees to stop suggesting improvements.
Kurakin.pro · note
Not Every Employee Needs AI
Why AI adoption should start from tasks and measurable value rather than license counts and active-user percentages.
Kurakin.pro · note
How to Know When a System Should Be Rewritten
When a full rewrite is justified and when it simply trades known problems for new ones while risking hidden business logic.
Kurakin.pro · note
Skills Matter More Than Job Titles
Why titles increasingly fail to describe real value and how skills change hiring, development, and internal mobility.
Kurakin.pro · note
AI Can Create Technical Debt Faster Than We Can
Why faster code generation requires stronger architecture, review, and testing discipline rather than weaker controls.
Kurakin.pro · note
AI for Managers: What Is Actually Worth Automating
Where AI helps managers prepare options, process information, and remove routine without replacing judgment or accountability.
Kurakin.pro · note
Why Strong Engineers Do Not Always Become Good Managers
Why promoting the best specialist does not guarantee a strong manager and which habits must change when moving into people leadership.
Kurakin.pro · note
Why a Strong CTO Can Sometimes Feel Difficult
Why a CTO needs to challenge the CEO, surface bad news, and sometimes say no — and where useful disagreement becomes toxicity.
Kurakin.pro · note
CTO vs CIO: What's the Difference?
A practical way to separate product and technology strategy from the systems that run the company itself.
Kurakin.pro · note
CTO or Tech Lead: Which One Does the Company Need?
When a company needs executive technology ownership and when a strong technical leader inside the team is the better answer.
Kurakin.pro · note
Shadow AI: Employees Are Already Using AI Without Permission
Why blanket bans often make AI use invisible and how to manage risk through clear rules, data boundaries, and accountability.
Kurakin.pro · note
Vendor Lock-In: When Supplier Dependence Becomes a Business Risk
How to evaluate vendor dependence through exit cost, data portability, negotiating power, and process criticality.
Kurakin.pro · note
Why Technical Debt Is a Business Problem
How technical debt affects business speed, the cost of change, operational risk, and strategic options.
Kurakin.pro · note
Leader or Manager: Why It Is a False Choice
Why strong executives need both leadership and management: direction without a system does not execute, and a system without direction loses meaning.
Kurakin.pro · note
Why Employees Stop Telling Leaders the Truth
How a leader's reaction to uncomfortable signals gradually teaches a team to filter bad news and surface problems too late.
Kurakin.pro · note
How a CEO Can Tell an IT Project Is Going Off Track
Early warning signs in goals, ownership, scope, and business involvement — without needing to inspect the code.
Kurakin.pro · note
Why Good Employees Leave
Why strong employees often start deciding to leave long before the resignation — and which management signals companies miss.
Kurakin.pro · note
What a CEO Should Know About Cybersecurity Without Becoming a CISO
Which cyber risks a CEO should see, why ownership and incident readiness matter, and what to ask instead of “are we secure?”
Kurakin.pro · note
How to Tell When a Manager Becomes the Team Bottleneck
Signs that team speed is now limited by the manager's calendar and what to change in delegation and decision boundaries.
Kurakin.pro · note
How a CEO Becomes the Company's Bottleneck
Why business speed starts depending on one person's calendar when too many decisions flow upward to the CEO.
Kurakin.pro · note
Your Company Does Not Need an AI Strategy
Why leaders should start with a business problem and measurable outcome instead of searching for tasks to fit a new technology.
Kurakin.pro · note
Why Employees Resist Change
Why resistance is often a rational response to uncertainty, past experience, and changes where the risk is clearer than the value.
Kurakin.pro · note
Technology Due Diligence: What to Check Before Acquiring a Company
How to evaluate architecture, people, data, dependencies, and the technology risks a buyer acquires with the business.
Kurakin.pro · note
Does Your Company Need a CTO?
When technology needs an executive owner and when a company is simply adding a larger title to a technical lead.
Kurakin.pro · note
Hire or Upskill: Which Is Better?
How to choose between external hiring and internal development by comparing speed, context, potential, and the cost of being wrong.
Kurakin.pro · note
AI Agents at Work: Who Is Accountable for Their Mistakes?
Who is accountable when an AI agent sends messages, changes data, or starts a process — and why action can be delegated but accountability cannot.
Kurakin.pro · note
Build or Buy: When to Build and When to Buy
How to decide what the company should truly own in-house and where a proven product is the smarter choice.
Kurakin.pro · note
Why Transformation Often Ends with a New Org Chart
Why new roles and reporting lines do not transform a company if decisions, authority, and workflow stay the same.
Kurakin.pro · note
ChatGPT Does Not Make a Company AI-Driven
Why individual productivity is only the first level and systematic change starts with processes, data, and ownership.
Kurakin.pro · note
Why IT Projects Fail Before Development Starts
How unclear goals, missing ownership, and attempts to automate unresolved organizational problems can doom a project before the first line of code.
Kurakin.pro · note
What to Discuss in One-on-One Meetings
How to keep one-on-ones from becoming task reports and use them to understand motivation, development, friction, and risk.
Kurakin.pro · note
How to Manage People Smarter Than You
Why strong managers do not compete with expertise and how to make disagreement, autonomy, and deep knowledge useful to the team.
Habr · translation
AI: An Enemy in the Mirror?
A reflection on four waves of labor automation and what may remain uniquely human in the age of AI.
Habr · translation
How We Adapt Agile at Ozon
Four ways poorly applied Agile harms business and engineering, plus a practical approach to delivery and team autonomy.
Executive.ru · translation
21 Rules for Successful IT Projects
A practical checklist for business ownership, scope, requirements, deadlines, data, quality, pilots, and user involvement.
Executive.ru · translation
10 Qualities of an Ideal IT Specialist
A hiring checklist covering ten qualities that help IT specialists strengthen a business and create useful products.
Executive.ru · translation
The Future of Work: Five Challenges Businesses Will Face
How HR and IT can prepare for human-machine collaboration, talent shortages, well-being, onboarding, and freelance work.
MODconf · adaptation
The Future of Work: Key Trends
Accelerating change, an ageing workforce, hybrid work, global hiring, freelancers, and changing workplace roles.
Delovoy Mir · translation
What Employers Can Learn from Computer Games
A five-level employee onboarding model, from first safe actions to independent decisions and management by values.
topcareer · translation
How IT Can Help Solve the Talent Shortage
How standardization, better workplaces, faster onboarding, and cross-functional teams help reduce staffing risks.
iCareer · translation
Why IT Specialists Change Jobs
Why IT specialists leave and what employers can do about compensation, legacy systems, bureaucracy, and burnout.
Dzen · translation
BHAG Goals: Why Dreaming Big Matters
Jim Collins' book "Built to Last" introduces the term BHAG - Big Hairy Audacious Goal, which translates as a big hairy ambitious goal (BHAG). This is an audacious long-term goal that...
Dzen · translation
10 Simple Career Tips
In this article I want to talk about 10 simple tips that will help improve your life overall and become more calm. If a person is full of strength and energy, then he will certainly succeed, so it is necessary...
Dzen · translation
Is a Fractal Person the Best Employee?
Previously, we have already analyzed the matrix of employee potentials, now I want to talk about the complex 5th type of employee - fractal. Let me note once again that a fractal person is someone who can change himself voluntarily and consciously without...
Dzen · translation
6 Types of Employees in an Organization
Every time you think about developing or expanding your business, the first thing you look at is not technology or space, but your own staff. Will they be able to realize their plans or will they fail at the most inopportune...
Dzen · translation
10 Secrets of Motivation
Many books and articles are devoted to issues of motivation. Why is this getting so much attention in the press? Because motivation determines how successfully your employees, and therefore your business processes, will work. No...
Dzen · translation
Micromanagement Is a Disaster for Business
If you have wondered why you are not going well at work, despite the fact that you perform your duties well, then perhaps it is because your manager is a micromanager. Here are the main signs of a micromanager:...
Dzen · translation
10 Timeless Questions About Motivation
I suggest you familiarize yourself with the list of questions that concern managers around the world regarding staff motivation, according to the famous specialist Philip Whiteley: 1. Motivation is a personal matter of the individual or it...
Dzen · translation
Coronavirus as a Test of Professional Fitness
For several weeks now, Russia, and Moscow in particular, has been gripped by a panic called Coronavirus. This panic affected both ordinary people and companies. I will leave the discussion of the virus itself outside the brackets, but...
Dzen · translation
Use FAST Goals Instead of SMART
It is no secret that it is not enough to assign a task to an employee; it is also necessary that the result of completing this task meets the expectations of the one who assigns it. To solve this problem, they came up with different methods, but the most...
Dzen · translation
What Makes Managers Over 35 Different
If you think it is difficult to find an employee, try to find a good manager. If vacancies for ordinary employees and leading specialists can be filled in a few weeks, then searching for worthy managers...
Dzen · translation
Why It Is Hard to Close a Losing Project or Quit a Job
Each of us has encountered the “suitcase without a handle” situation, when it’s a shame to throw it away and inconvenient to carry. Such situations are often faced by professionals of different levels and stripes in a variety of industries and segments...
Dzen · translation
COVID-19: Without Technology, You Are Finished
Everyone says, thank you to the doctors - of course, thank them very much! A lot has been written about doctors, so I won’t dwell on this in detail. And if doctors are fighting the virus on the front line, then here I want to talk about...
Dzen · translation
Remote Work: Expectations vs. Reality
We all unanimously switched to self-isolation mode and, at the same time, remote work. Despite the fact that some enterprises still continue to operate as usual, the majority have mastered or are continuing...
Dzen · translation
How to Demonstrate Emotional Intelligence on Your Resume
Along with the term IQ (intelligence quotient), another term that reflects the emotional state of the candidate - EQ (emotional intelligence) has firmly entered our everyday life. EQ is essentially a person's ability to recognize...
Dzen · translation
Coronavirus as a Model of the Future
A self-isolation regime has been introduced in a number of regions, within which the rights of citizens are not limited. However, there are a number of mandatory recommendations that citizens must follow. (Schrödinger's self-isolation?) Waking up...
Dzen · translation
How to Get Promoted: 5 Effective Tips from Google
Sooner or later, each of us thinks about a promotion at work. An additional incentive is that somewhere a salary increase is possible only when promoted. Let's look at 5 key methods...
Dzen · translation
A Quote That Will Give You Confidence in Salary Interviews
The world's chief firefighter - this is how Paul Eder was commonly called in professional circles. A simple guy from Texas became famous for his professional attitude and approach to firefighting, for which he received the nickname "Red"...
Dzen · translation
How to Manage Employees During Quarantine
Now many employees are leaving en masse for remote work, and so are managers. A logical question arises - how to effectively manage remote employees who recently worked in the office, and even yourself...
Dzen · translation
10 Ideas for Supporting Business Processes During Isolation
Sometimes good techniques and tools help mitigate problems that arise in business. I would like to share these techniques and tips for using them: Start with exercise. I don't just mean physical...
Dzen · translation
Company Strategy in 30 Minutes
In this article I’ll tell you about a simple but effective strategic planning tool PL3 (projects in 3 layers). PL3 was born as a tool out of a need to create a simple, fast and versatile tool...
Dzen · translation
Do You Have Integrity?
One of my friends talked about how people are selected for some successful Western companies - based on just one criterion of integrity. And then I came across an article that analyzed the key values of companies...
Dzen · translation
Why Employees Perform Poorly When Working Remotely
So, you sent your employees to work home, but the efficiency of their work decreased significantly, and some practically stopped working altogether. What happened? It's simple: since for many this test...
Dzen · translation
What Coronavirus Teaches Business
The epidemic has covered Russia and Moscow in particular. And now the President addresses the nation and forcibly sends everyone on a week-long vacation. Of course, this decree does not apply to everyone. But now we’re not talking about that, but about the fact that...
Dzen · translation
#stillWorking: Schrodinger's Work Week
In our country, Schrödinger’s non-working week is coming, which can be called so based on the famous “Schrodinger’s Cat” experiment. Its essence lies in the fact that there is a box, inside of which there is a Cat...
Dzen · translation
A Not-So-Empty Moscow: #stillWorking
On Sunday, suspecting nothing, I calmly prepared for the upcoming work week. Schrödinger's non-working week promised to go differently for everyone. But I think everyone’s plans were unexpectedly interrupted by the evening general...
Dzen · translation
The Hewlett-Packard Law and the Death of a Company
Once upon a time, one of the founders of HP, David Packard, suggested that the company would rather die due to the inability to implement too many features than from the lack of them. This statement was based on...
Dzen · translation
The Five Levels of Management
One of the factors determining the success of an organization is the ability of employees to solve assigned tasks and achieve set goals. Despite the fact that some units may have...
Dzen · translation
Why Professionals Struggle to Find Jobs
The question may seem far-fetched, but in fact it has a place. The fact is that recently a large number of qualified personnel have appeared on the labor market, who for a long time cannot...
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How can IT help business in times of change?
HR ANALYTICS 2021