Beware of Glue Work

Be deliberate about your career and how you spend your time

6 min readAug 13, 2024

Disclaimer: Being Glue by Tanya Reilly inspired this post. It’s a great read — check it out!

This blog is targeted for junior engineers (and particularly females because Glue Work tends to fall to females) looking for advice on what you can be doing to develop your career. It will provide tips for thinking about where you want to go with your career and how to spend your time in order to get there (whether that means doing Glue Work or not).

What is “glue work”?

Here’s a scenario…

Murphy is a junior engineer who just joined Team Foo last year. Despite this, she’s already a leader on the team! She writes documentation, runs meetings, sets up communication channels, fixes sources of friction in developer tooling, and generally makes the team more efficient. Her teammates love working with her.

Michael is also a junior engineer on the team who joined around the same time. Michael differs from Murphy: he’s a coding machine and spends all his time writing code for important features (and does a great job), but doesn’t do much else.

Come end of year performance reviews, Michael gets promoted because of all the great features that he’s delivered. Murphy on the other hand gets a high rating, but isn’t promoted and is told that she needs to “deliver more features and be more technical”.

Is this fair?

Fair or not, this is a real life scenario that happens.

The work that Murphy was doing is called “Glue Work”.

Glue Work are the tasks that are necessary for a team to operate, but NOT the deliverable itself (NOT the product or the code). It’s all those things that Murphy was doing.

While Glue Work is valuable and necessary for a team to succeed, it might not be where you want to spend your time (right now).

Isn’t that all good?

Yes! Glue Work is extremely valuable and necessary for the team! Teams cannot operate unless we’re efficiently communicating with one another, having a shared understanding, sharing tools, and moving in a common direction. Glue Work is some of the most valuable work for a team delivering software.

And that’s part of the trap.

So what’s the problem?

Glue Work is valuable and necessary, but you, as a junior engineer, probably shouldn’t be doing it.

The trap with Glue Work is the opportunity cost. As a junior engineer, you should be building the foundation of your technical skills. And the only way to learn is by doing. If you want to grow as an engineer, you should be spending your time doing technical things to build those technical skills.

The risk of doing too much Glue Work early in your career is that time is taken away from building that technical foundation.

It’s a problem if the Glue Work leads you down a career path that wasn’t intentional.

What should I do?

All that said, glue work isn’t inherently bad. The real problem with doing glue work is the opportunity cost: it means you aren’t doing other things.

What are the other things you aren’t doing because you’re doing Glue Work? Time is a finite resource that you should be intentional with.

Be deliberate.

Your career is your responsibility.

Where do you want to go?

Who do you want to be? Think about who you admire. Who does stuff that you want to do? Who do you look at and think, “one day, I’d like to be doing what they’re doing. I could see myself being them and being happy/satisfied”. What are they doing?

What work gets you into a “flow” state? To figure out what you have a natural passion for, think about times where you’ve gotten into “flow”: when you were so engaged in a task that hours passed by before you came up for air and realized how much time had passed. If you’re mostly doing that for a living, you’re going to be engaged in your work and doing work you love.

How do you get there?

Figure out what skills you need to develop and where you should be spending your time.

Speak with a role model or someone who is in the role that you’re aspiring towards. Learn from them how they got there and what skills they believe are necessary for the role.

Do you want a promotion at your company? See if your company has “role criteria” that defines the skills expected of somebody in a given role. You might be able to figure this out by looking at your company’s Careers page for recruiting.

How do I put this into action?

Step One: Talk with your manager about it! Hopefully your manager is already talking to you about your career, where you want to go and what skills you want to be developing. If not, start a conversation with them about it. Tell them where you want to go, what you want to learn, and where you’d like to spend more time.

Here are some other ideas to ensure that you’re developing the skills that will take you where you want to go:

Do the most important thing first. “Pay yourself first”. Use the first hour of your day to work on the most important thing. That way, no matter what interruptions appear, you’ve ensured that you got the most important thing done
Block your calendar. Make time for focus work, not just meetings
Say “no” to distractions (which might mean Glue Work). Keep a “Not Doing List”: when you’re faced with a decision about doing something or not, ask yourself, “Should I do this?”
If you see gaps where Glue Work needs to get done, bring it up to your manager (instead of doing it yourself)
If you’re doing scrum, ticket your Glue Work and story point. That way, at sprint planning, you have a process to deliberately decide whether or not it should be done, and you’re making a conscious decision to do it or not do it

In summary,

Be deliberate; about where you’re going and what you’re doing.

Glue work is important, but it should usually be reserved for senior leaders of the team. Glue work distracts junior members from developing core technical skills.

Be intentional about where you’re going with your career. Do the things that develop the skills required for where you want to go.

If you’re a lead or mentor reading this

Please make sure you’re talking with your junior teammates about this. Talk to them about where they want to go with their career, what skills they want to be developing, and encourage them to focus on technical work.

Take on the Glue Work so they don’t have to.

Links

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Images generated by ChatGPT.