Being Glue
noidea.dog
noidea.dog
> 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 this describes you, congratulations: you're the glue.
Edit: Looks like the title was changed to "Being Glue" which is probably a better title.
> > ... If this describes you, congratulations: you're the glue.
> Edit: Looks like the title was changed to "Being Glue" which is probably a better title.
This what I though first just after sew previous title for this HN thread!
And "being glue" is mostly my way in contributing to opensource projects which I'm involved in ;)
FTR, As a background, I have master's degree in PM.
About as much of my job is about ensuring everyone else on the team is able to be their most productive, as it is applying my skills and experience to a project of my own. Sometimes that means working with engineers in my team directly on stuff, or acting as a sounding board. Other times that's getting involved in certain meetings to be able to present a more detailed technical response, and potentially head things off at the pass. As I've learned to take a step back from things, I can see just how much my influence has effect within the group.
I do still love getting my hands dirty, I love solving problems. I've no intention of ever stepping away from that kind of work. I don't really have to, either, even with the seniority.
Reality is when you do "glue work" more and more you become senior and only then you should be promoted to reflect reality.
That ability, though, hinges entirely on the affordances provided by an equitable social context. That is: mutual respect, acceptance, understanding, open mindedness and so on.
In that regard, the earning the title "senior" isn't just a reflection of your own maturity, who is awarded that title is just as much a reflection of workplace culture, it's values and the available opportunities.
If you have a senior engineer doing the work described in this article, then they have stepped into a Product Owner role. The only real problem with that is when it is done accidentally. If they want to continue to code and advance their technical career, this isn't the right move. If they want to move out of coding and into leadership, this is a good move.
Either way, deliberately acknowledging that they are now a PO will help focus their efforts, as there is a wealth of information online about doing that role well.
Product Manager: responsible for technical and commercial product-market fit. Getting Voice of Customer. Understanding market size. Setting pricing.
Electrical/hardware/software Engineer: technical producer of the code/hardware/etc.... unit that is used in the product.
Systems Engineer: responsible for ensuring requirements of the project and product are met, tested, and giving confidence to the business that they have tested product, that will meet the user needs, will work in the environment where the product is used, and is ready for production.
Product Owner: Ultimate decider for product features in real-time. Ensures during development that the right product is being built, everyone knows what should be known.
Core team lead/ Project Manager: the person enabling the project to proceed. Manages business, timeline, requesting headcount, enabling critical path to move forward, etc...
Engineering Manager: responsible for hiring and training engineers, ensuring engineers have appropriate workloads, ensuring engineers have desired career development.
Depending on the size of the team and project, people may wear more than one hat. In many software shops they usually just split out Product Manager, People Manager, and Software Engineer. Thus the "glue" pieces are those roles missing above.
> Where do I find companies that value and seek glue/leads?
I think most companies value such work; it's just important to find the language they use. For example, in my BU, we have agile scrum masters. They are doing essentially the same work as technical project managers in my previous BU from the same company. I'd just advise reading the ad language and deciding whether that's "glue you like" or not...
N.B. this advice is really for "normal" times; if you're remote it may be harder or easier to do the social part necessary, I have no idea.
Essentially, it is the PO's responsibility to ensure that everyone on the squad knows what to do and how they should be doing it. If not, the PO calls a meeting and brings the right people together until a consensus is found.
Having a full time PO on each squad lets the PO take up any work that isn't coding, but is blocking squad progress.
It feels so “wrong” to me to not share knowledge that I know can help someone else on my team immediately to the point that it becomes difficult to do what I am supposed to do.
I don’t know what I should do. Is there a book or a video that I can learn from? Maybe a mentor?
Or, am I stuck being glue?
So, naturally I immediately concluded your link was going to be about a dog as well. Before clicking I even convinced myself that 'noidea' was most definitely your dog's cool and funky name.
The sad fact in some places is that as a woman, your choices for skirt length are "too prude" or "too slutty", and your choices for the amount of glue work you do are "not technical enough" or "not a team player".
Some of these places then act really really surprised when their women leave - sometimes leave the field entirely.
My humble contribution of the day for managers, if you've tried everything else and your equality metrics are still not going up:
1. Who is the glue keeping your team together? 2. Promote them. (Not move them into management, promote them to your equivalent of senior engineer.)
I think this is controversial. If you have a software engineer being promoted to senior software engineer (1 -> 2) without at least intermediate knowledge of the codebase, that'll make other seniors suspicious/wary.
Personally speaking, if you hire a software engineer that does mainly/only glue work, you mis-hired. What you meant to hire was a technical project manager. Move that person to a TPM if they want to (and are great at what they do) instead of having a senior software engineer who hasn't really shipped anything noteworthy.
In the post, she mentions for example:
> The manager has a bunch of teams and is starting to rely on Engineer to know what's going on with this one. Hey, Awesome Coder seems blocked. Do you know what the deal is? > > Our Engineer investigates, discovers that Awesome Coder needs information from another team but is mired in a three week long email thread. She talks to some people in real life, figures out what the confusion is, sorts it out. Awesome Coder is unblocked. He says thank you, writes thousands of lines of code.
This sounds to me like she knows exactly what's going on in the relevant part of the codebase to be able to get the information to unblock Awesome Coder.
> A customer comes in with a request: they want data that the API really should be able to provide but the team hasn't prioritised this feature yet. Our friend here spends a couple of days manually getting the data the customer needs. The customer is overjoyed.
Again, it looks like she's perfectly fine writing productive code when you let her.
I've worked with several great people in the past who exactly fit the description of "glue person" - although most of them were male - and I found that mostly, while the Awesome Coder types had an excellent understanding of their own part of the code, the glue people were the only ones who really understood how things worked together. So you got someone in team A saying why not replace libX with libY because it makes our Z easier, and the glue person speaks up and says actually I worked with someone on Team B last week, and they're using feature W of libX.
Tanya herself admits that "is this person a Senior Engineer" is controversial. But I'd say that someone who is glue in a way that clearly demonstrates a deep technical understanding of the codebase should qualify, even if that understanding is not demonstrated by writing her own code.
I think this is exactly the controversial part. If the person manually gets some data and documents how to get the data, that's not writing code. That's understanding how to use a system, and can be done by an L1 or L2 tech support person.
> This sounds to me like she knows exactly what's going on in the relevant part of the codebase to be able to get the information to unblock Awesome Coder.
But yes, that's what I thought too. You often can't, it seems to me, make out these issues without deep understanding of the problem.
In general, I understand your perspective too. It's just a hard problem to solve. I would say that if I'm hired to do X and for whatever reason, I mostly do Y, that should be a huge red flag. The manager should have stepped in a long time before promotion talk comes around (as the post mentions), but it would be to me, personally, as well (did the company lie in their job interviews?).
Why would you stop a step short of writing code to do it for the customer? That essential time spending now to save many future hours is the root of why we code, and defines being a programmer, in my opinion.
This is the correct call, both technically and for the customer. The feature is planned but not prioritized, so pulling it in right now screws up the sprint. It will almost certainly also take longer to write, debug, test, and ship than it will to just pull the data - and even that assumes no UI is required for the customer to use it. A manual pull is the fastest way to satisfy the request, and that's why it's the right call from that perspective.
Note also that our friend does not only pull the data, but also documents how that was done. This means that when the relevant feature ticket does come into a sprint, it comes with detailed information and a worked example on exactly how it needs to do what it does. That'll save whoever picks it up a ton of discovery time, and that's why it's the right call from that perspective.
"Programmer" isn't the job title. "Engineer" is. There's a lot of reasons why. This kind of thing is one of them.
> She talks to some people in real life, figures out what the confusion is, sorts it out.
She didn't "demonstrate a deep technical understanding of the codebase". She did management work.
In general, if the glue person has intermediate knowledge of the codebase, they'd get promoted without much controversy. In such a case, it should not be difficult for them to bang out a couple of features and ship it, for example.
She clearly did. Without that she would not be able to onboard or contribute to the design discussions and would not be able to help customers out. You can't assume that customers implies non-technical. In mid to large orgs most of your customers are other teams with very technical needs.
> if you hire a software engineer that does mainly/only glue work, you mis-hired
No, it depends on what your team needed. You can't have a 5-person team where everyone is great at crunching code unless your only success metric is LOC produced. You need diverse set of skills to deliver and maintain the product. You mis-hired only if your glue competencies are already covered.
In general I see this as a massive problem that many engineers believe that technical excellence is all that's needed to build a product. It isn't. Design reviews, code reviews, and onboarding for technical staff are very much technical.
And simple technical tasks that are tedious and boring are still technical tasks. And as a senior I would never assign them to a junior developer unless there's a lesson to be learned by doing them (once). If your glue person is picking them and you judge glue person's output by the complexity of those tasks (not technical enough!) then your metrics are wrong.
Given your technical seniority / superiority, whose time is better spent on tackling the thorniest challenges?
You'd be surprised. I've worked with some people that can say all the right things when it comes to design discussions. However, when it comes to them actually implementing the design discussions, that they themselves talked about, they struggle.
Why do we keep expecting unicorn people who are good at everything both directly and indirectly related to their role?
This is why we have cross disciplinary teams.
You absolutely can. Software development is a field that requires a set of intellectual abilities that are mutually (broadly, though of course individuals vary) correlated, not anticorrelated. Being great at crunching code doesn't imply being bad at any other skill required of the profession.
I enjoy the large variety in my day to day work, it helps me build a large network of people and until now it made me a more essential and valued employee
Of course, they now have processes to avoid favours and such so we all have to go through the same internal ticketing and scheduling system and it's completely random whether you will get someone useful and helpful or not. You don't even see a name on the reply most times.
I knew an older guy who retired a few years ago and he also called himself glue at the time. He'd long abandoned coding (he secretly admitted to me that he could do a bit, but publicly claimed ignorance) but had a good handle on what the company could do and who was doing it, which helped him talk to the right people to design feasible solutions for customers.
I also tend to value this sort of work and I aspire to be this sort of person, but it's easy to see how a company would end up incentivizing their engineers to create more stuff.
Creating stuff gives glue types their chance to optimize the small stuff.
Meanwhile, it's genuinely harder to find someone who can rise to the occasion of high technical output after doing a good glue job, than it is someone who does great technical work and can also be this sort of glue person.
Someone who does a lot of high impact technical work can identify bottlenecks and could very well do the same work as the glue person. The opposite isn't always true.
It's also much harder to figure out if someone is just very nice and doing work that would be picked up by someone else in their absence or if they are indeed identifying pain points no one else could.
If you can get promoted for many things in multiple ways, that means diverse promotion system, which means you'll get more diverse seniors and more diverse leadership.
If your goal is to have a wide range of skilled people from various backgrounds in senior places, relaxing rules around promotions is definitely a way to get closer to that goal.
If you have a strict promotion criteria, you might end up promoting very similar people.
An extreme example: Only people from Ivy League schools can get to senior and above.
Consequence: you'll end up with very heterogeneous leadership 5-10 years of such a policy (most likely even leadership that formed friendships while in university).
It links to the paper describing how non-promotable work is divided between genders in a mixed setting. This is clearly a diversity problem. If women take the bulk of work that won't get them promoted, you end up with women underrepresented in senior positions. Did you read the article?
The article's argument, as I read it, is that Glue Person is as good a coder as the next person when she has a whole block of time free in her calendar, but the problem is that her calendar is full of meetings.
One thing I like about this post is that it presents an actionable way to do something to improve diversity: managers should check if the women in your team are disproportionately loaded with the kind of task that's essential for the project to succeed, but doesn't count as much for promotion metrics.