They are not talking about writing "glue code" (misleading title perhaps). They are talking about engineering management and senior responsibilities:<p>> 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.<p>Edit: Looks like the title was changed to "Being Glue" which is probably a better title.
It's only really in the last year, maybe two, that I've become comfortable with this being my role. I'm a jack of all trades, so I fill in the gaps within my team.<p>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.<p>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.
I like the point she makes at the end... if you don't know how to do the glue work, communicating effectively, onboarding others, etc... you're not well rounded... and shouldn't be promoted until you learn those skills as well.
This role is often referred to as "Product Owner".<p>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.<p>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.
Video of the talk: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KClAPipnKqw" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KClAPipnKqw</a>
This is accurate, not for me but for another person on my team. He struggled for years to get promoted because of a perceived lack of focus from upper management. In reality he was handling a big part of the TL's job and several other people's job. The happy part of the story is that he got promoted a few months ago.
I am someone who enjoys/excels at being a "glue", I'm not quite an engineering manager yet but I don't write tons of code anymore either. I have been struggling to find a job. Every job I see is either entry level individual contributor or senior manager. Where do I find companies that value and seek glue/leads?
On my team, this glue work is the responsibility of the Product Owner.<p>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.<p>Having a full time PO on each squad lets the PO take up any work that isn't coding, but is blocking squad progress.
This post might as well be describing me to the point that I feel both happy and sad.<p>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.<p>I don’t know what I should do. Is there a book or a video that I can learn from? Maybe a mentor?<p>Or, am I stuck being glue?
My dog's name is Dotcom and I bought him the domain dotcom.dog.<p>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.
Great talk - I have a feeling she'd get on well with rachelbythebay, whose blog has a lot of posts on the same theme.<p>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".<p>Some of these places then act really really surprised when their women leave - sometimes leave the field entirely.<p>My humble contribution of the day for managers, if you've tried everything else and your equality metrics are still not going up:<p>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 like the term glue, I am a senior tester but a lot of my work is around just that- gluing things together, although sometimes it is more about un-sticking things.<p>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
First, I don't get why diversity is given passing mention when there's nothing related specific to diversity or gender politics in the solid idea discussed by the article.<p>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.<p>Creating stuff gives glue types their chance to optimize the small stuff.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.