📖 Business
Being Glue
"Glue work" is the invisible labor that holds engineering teams together: writing documentation nobody asked for, facilitating meetings, onboarding new hires, improving processes, resolving interpersonal conflicts, connecting people who should be talking to each other, noticing when a project is drifting and pulling it back on track. This work is absolutely essential to team function — without it, teams fragment, knowledge silos form, and projects stall. But it's rarely recognized in performance reviews, promotion packets, or engineering ladders. Reilly, who popularized this term in her widely shared talk, devotes significant attention to both the value and the danger of glue work for staff-plus engineers.
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How It Works
The glue work spectrum:
Essential glue (your job at staff level):
- Setting technical direction and ensuring alignment
- Facilitating cross-team architectural decisions
- Mentoring engineers on technical growth
- Writing design docs that unblock entire teams
- Resolving technical disagreements constructively
Dangerous glue (fills gaps the org should fix):
- Taking meeting notes because nobody else will
- Being the default onboarding buddy for every new hire
- Manually coordinating deployments that should be automated
- Fixing the CI pipeline every week instead of advocating for investment
- Acting as the unofficial project manager because the team doesn't have one
The trap: doing so much glue work that you stop writing code, then getting penalized at review time for "not being technical enough." This disproportionately affects women and underrepresented engineers who are culturally conditioned to volunteer for this work.
Reilly's advice for navigating the trap:
- Make glue work visible — put it in your weekly updates, your brag doc, your promotion packet. If it's not written down, it didn't happen.
- Ensure it's valued — ask your manager explicitly: "Does this count toward my performance evaluation?" If no, stop doing it.
- Don't let it crowd out technical work — maintain a minimum threshold of code, design docs, and technical artifacts that demonstrate your engineering contribution.
- Distinguish strategic glue from gap-filling — strategic glue is your job. Gap-filling is a signal the org has a structural problem.