Glue work considered harmful
“Glue work” is an concept Tanya Reilly came up with in 2019. The idea is that there’s a large amount of unglamorous work that every team needs in order to be efficient: updating the docs and roadmap, addressing technical debt, onboarding engineers, making sure people talk to their counterparts on other teams, noticing strands that are getting dropped, and so on. Practical, naive engineers gravitate to this work because it’s obviously useful, but at promo or bonus time they’re ignored in favor of the engineers who did more visible work (like delivering new features).
I think this concept is excellent. It’s why I keep saying that shipping projects is so hard - if you’re the kind of engineer who’s used to just putting their head down and writing code, you won’t have the tools to do the glue work that is actually needed to deliver anything successfully. Pure hackers don’t ship. You need to be able to actually deal with the friction in a large organization in order to deliver value.
So why doesn’t glue work get you promoted, if it’s so crucial to shipping projects? Are companies stupid? Are they deliberately leaving value on the table? No, I don’t think so. Companies don’t reward glue work because they don’t want you prioritizing it. And they don’t want you prioritizing it because they want you shipping features. Glue work is hard. If you’re capable of doing glue work well, they want you to use that ability to deliver projects instead of improving general efficiency.
The core problem is that you’re deciding for yourself what the company needs instead of doing your job. Isn’t it your job to make your team run smoother? No! Your job is to execute the mission of your company’s leadership. It is better to execute that mission at 60% efficiency than to spend all your time increasing efficiency in general (or even worse, to execute some other mission at 100% efficiency). Why? For two main reasons: first, you’re inevitably going to burn out, which will be bad for everyone; second, it’s better to let your team get used to operating at the base efficiency level of the company instead of artificially removing friction for a brief period.
Should you never do glue work? No, you should do glue work tactically. That is, you should do this kind of extra work for the projects you lead - the projects whose success you’re accountable for - in order to make sure they succeed. You won’t be rewarded for the glue work specifically, but you will be rewarded for the success of the project. For other projects, you should just do your regular job.
Is this a deeply cynical take about how to succeed in office politics? I don’t actually think so. Large tech companies operate at something like 20-60% efficiency at any given time (as they get larger, they get less efficient)1. Even knowing that, growing is a deliberate choice: companies grow in order to capture more surface area, since even at a lower efficiency that’s a way to produce much more value. If individual employees are willing to lift their local team to 80% or 90% efficiency by burning their time on glue work, companies will take that free value, but they don’t have any real interest in locking that in for the long term (since it depends on exceptional people volunteering their time in hard-to-rewrad ways and thus isn’t sustainable).
If you’re one of those exceptional people, congratulations! You can use that power tactically to be a more effective engineer. But you shouldn’t do it all the time2.
Update: some interesting discussion of this post on HN and lobsters. I think this comment by friendlysock is particularly good.