LeadDev
1 HN recommender · recommended in 3 months, 2020–2022
28:20 · 93K views · May 10, 2019
Tanya Reilly's LeadDev talk on glue work, the invisible coordination and support tasks engineers do that keep teams successful but can hurt careers.
HN refers to it in career and promotion discussions, including its warning about doing glue work too early in your career.
3 comments from Hacker News
> My suggestion is to find gaps that aren't integration efforts, if possible, that are instead extension efforts. Yes! This can go even further and the technical integration work can easily slip into soft/people/team/project/management integration. Here is a talk which warns against doing this kind of glue work too early in your career: Video: this video Summary article: [LINK]
Based on the talk [0] where the OP suggested it number of times. She mentions the engineer being rusty and having significantly fewer code contributions than her peers. 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. [0] this video
Interesting to think of this in the context of Glue Work. this video Building culture means handling these opposing forces in a productive manner.