Blog: The Context Switching Tax: Why Engineering Teams Ship Less Than They Think

The Best Project Managers Aren’t the Loudest in the Room

Những quản lý dự án giỏi không phải người nói nhiều hay ồn ào nhất, mà là người tạo ra sự rõ ràng, giảm thiểu xung đột và hỗ trợ nhóm một cách âm thầm. Họ lắng nghe trước khi nói, đặt câu hỏi để hiểu chứ không phải thách thức, nhận biết ai đang mất tập trung và giữ bình tĩnh dưới áp lực. Công việc thực sự của họ thường vô hình như điều phối mọi người, thúc đẩy quyết định, cảnh báo rủi ro sớm và quản lý căng thẳng cùng kỳ vọng.

Lập trình viên nên đọc bài này để hiểu cách một quản lý dự án hiệu quả thực sự tác động đến hiệu suất nhóm thông qua sự lắng nghe, giải quyết vấn đề ẩn và xây dựng môi trường làm việc nhàn nhã, không phụ thuộc vào sự nổi tiếng hay tiếng nói nhiều.

7 reasons experienced EMs get stuck

Experienced engineering managers often stall in their careers by repeating predictable mistakes, even when they're aware of them. Seven key traps are identified: confusing title with impact (a Director title at a small scope is misleading), equating team size with importance, blindly applying tactics from previous companies, over-delegating to the point of abandonment, using authority instead of reasoning, under-delegating due to lack of trust, and focusing only on problems while neglecting recognition. The author draws on personal experience, including a failed startup and a humbling return to an EM role, to illustrate each pitfall with candor.

Why Scrum Isn’t Working Even Though You’re Doing Scrum

Organizations often implement all the Scrum ceremonies and roles yet still fail to see the expected benefits. The core problems are: Scrum events becoming empty rituals rather than value-generating activities, sprint interruptions being treated as costless when they erode team trust and focus, organizational lack of prioritization pushing too many demands onto teams, leaders not creating the right environment for self-managing teams, Scrum Masters staying too close to the team instead of removing organizational impediments, and excessive rules making Scrum feel like bureaucracy. The recommended approach is to apply Scrum's own inspect-and-adapt principle to improve Scrum itself — identifying the biggest root cause and experimenting with one change at a time rather than attempting a big-bang reset.

How to prepare for your engineering manager interview

Preparing for an engineering manager interview requires a different approach than IC interviews. Key strategies include building a 'story bank' of leadership anecdotes covering common management challenges (performance issues, hiring, conflict resolution), practicing concise storytelling using the STAR method, articulating your leadership style with concrete examples, and honestly addressing gaps in your experience. Technical rounds are also universal — expect code screens, system design, and AI-related questions depending on how hands-on the role is. Rejection is common and should be treated as feedback to refine your approach for the next loop.

So You Want to Fix Your All Hands

At least half of any team finds All Hands meetings wasteful because they feel redundant, self-serving, or boring. A structured format fixes this: open with something curiosity-driven (like 'Tree Talk'), show a single org chart slide highlighting changes, give direct reports time to present their own work, and close with a mystery guest fireside chat. Keep it to 90 minutes, quarterly, and skip the open Q&A in favor of async channels. Consistency in format reduces anxiety and builds trust. The real purpose is inoculating the team with quality information to cut through gossip and rumors, especially for newer employees who lack the informal networks of the old guard.

AI Made Every Individual Stronger and Every Team More Fragmented. Yimao Zhou Is Building the OS to Reverse That

Yimao Zhou, 23-year-old founder of Emagen AI, argues that current AI agent tools are optimizing individual productivity while worsening the real bottleneck: team coordination. He claims 60% of knowledge workers' time goes to coordination costs, yet every major AI product focuses on the remaining 40%. His product Cagen is positioned as an 'OS Level Agent' that inverts the human-AI relationship — AI drives workflows and calls on humans for judgment, rather than waiting to be queried. Zhou draws parallels to historical computing shifts (PC to Windows, mobile apps to iOS/Android) and predicts an OS layer will emerge for AI-assisted work. He argues incumbents like Notion, GitHub, and Salesforce can't build cross-tool organizational intelligence due to conflicting incentives, and that tools like MCP are connectors, not operating systems. Early customers include non-tech businesses with high operational complexity. Zhou predicts 90% of today's AI agent startups will be commoditized within three years, with survivors being those who built at layers foundation models can't absorb.

We Tried Agile and It Didn’t Work

When teams say 'we tried agile and it didn't work,' leaders should treat it as diagnostic data rather than resistance. Common failure modes include adopting agile ceremonies without changing decision-making, weak product ownership, excessive work in progress, symbolic empowerment, and leaders delegating agile to teams without changing the surrounding system. The post outlines a five-pillar diagnostic framework (mindset, practices, roles, teamwork, outside-the-team support) and a practical recovery path: acknowledge the previous experience honestly, name a concrete outcome, pick one small visible improvement, maintain an improvement backlog, and inspect results. Skeptics should be engaged as sources of information rather than dismissed. If the word 'agile' carries too much baggage, leaders can pursue agile goals under different framing.