Dr. Mario's 2nd 🧠

Being Glue Talk

3 min read

rw-book-cover

Metadata

Highlights

Your job title says “software engineer”, but you seem to spend most of your time in meetings. You’d like to have time to code, but nobody else is onboarding the junior engineers, updating the roadmap, talking to the users, noticing the things that got dropped, asking questions on design documents, and making sure that everyone’s going roughly in the same direction. If you stop doing those things, the team won’t be as successful. But now someone’s suggesting that you might be happier in a less technical role. If this describes you, congratulations: you’re the glue. If it’s not, have you thought about who is filling this role on your team? (View Highlight)

Every senior person in an organisation should be aware of the less glamorous - and often less-promotable - work that needs to happen to make a team successful. Managed deliberately, glue work demonstrates and builds strong technical leadership skills. Left unconscious, it can be career limiting. It can push people into less technical roles and even out of the industry. (View Highlight)

tech contrib

They’re like yes, this is good work. But you didn’t really have a technical contribution. (View Highlight)

Glue work is the difference between a project that succeeds and one that fails. This is why technical program managers and project managers make such an impact: they do the ultimate glue role. They see the gaps and fill them. (View Highlight)

“You must be this socially competent to be a manager.” I am, but that is not my idea of a good time! (View Highlight)

Taking a step away from a more technical role closes doors. It’s not fair, but our industry biases are set up so that you really need to have a solid engineering resume before you take a non-engineering role. (View Highlight)

If she and her manager want her to continue doing a lot of glue work, is there a title that gives her tech credibility? Can she become technical lead or something? (View Highlight)

If you’re telling underrepresented folks in your org that titles don’t matter, you’re doing them a disservice. Titles matter a ton. (View Highlight)

Stop being the unofficial lead. (If you’re in the same situation and you’re the official lead, consider stopping that too!) (View Highlight)

If you only do glue, you will only get better at glue. You’re making your team more effective but you’re hurting your future self. No matter what you end up doing, you are unlikely to regret feeling more confident in core technical skills. (View Highlight)

The Awesome Coder only succeeded because someone else on the team went and talked to other people and broke him out of the email thread of doom. He couldn’t communicate well enough to ask another team for some data that he needed. (View Highlight)

The System Designer only succeeded because someone else on the team asked what the thing he was building was actually for. He didn’t have the technical judgement to step back and understand how his system would integrate with the other systems the company was building and to be clear about the problem they were all solving. (View Highlight)

Should they have been promoted? Are they really senior engineers? I don’t think they are. (View Highlight)

Managers: If your job ladder doesn’t require that your senior people have glue work skills, think about how you’re expecting that work to get done. (View Highlight)

Graph View

Backlinks