Being Glue

Good career advice, and a great exploration of glue work: "the difference between a project that succeeds and one that fails".

"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... congratulations: you're the glue...

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... Let's talk about how to allocate glue work deliberately, frame it usefully..."

Recognising "glue work" is essential, particularly as letting more junior roles take it on means they don't get recognised: "We lose good engineers because they happen to also be good at other skills we need".

Glue work is non-promotable, and rhere's an interesting gender bias:

• "when there is non-promotable work to be done, women volunteer to do it 48% more often than men...
• men volunteered less ... they knew that a woman would volunteer...
• managers ... asked women 44% more than they asked men".