Code is cheap now. Glue isn't.
Writing code isn’t the bottleneck anymore. Getting it out the door is.
An engineer with an agent can open a pile of changes before lunch. Somebody still has to decide what’s worth building, unblock the team next door, and make sure support knows what’s coming.
That’s glue work. I push my engineers toward it, because it’s the road to owning things. But that push comes with a debt, and the debt is mine.
Glue, the original
Tanya Reilly’s talk Being Glue named this. Glue work is what makes a team work: onboarding people, spotting gaps between teams, keeping a project moving, writing the doc everyone needed.
Her warning is the important part. Glue work often doesn’t count toward promotion, and it falls disproportionately on women. People who do a lot of it early can find their careers quietly stalled.
So pushing people toward glue is only fair if the manager does the other half. Share it out on purpose, so it doesn’t land on whoever volunteers. And make it count.
Why it matters more now
When code was expensive, the scarce skill was writing it fast.
Now the agent types. What’s scarce is judgment and follow-through: knowing who needs to hear about a change, and whether it actually shipped or just merged.
None of that lives in the diff. All of it is glue.
From glue to ownership
I build up team leads, some with the title and some without, and invest in them. Then I hand them the ambiguous projects, the ones without a clear owner or a clean spec.
That’s ownership, and ownership is what should get promoted. The glue skills are what let a lead work it out with the stakeholders.
Making it count
With the engineering managers, I created the Weekly Engineering Update, a meeting and a document, for an engineering org of more than 55 people. The document was the point: a running record of the work.
On my own teams today, people publish what shipped and what got faster every week, in the open.
Visibility is where it starts. The standard I hold myself to is further along: glue work has to show up where promotions get decided, with the person’s name on it. That part of the job is mine.
The agents will keep getting better at the code. The people who hold everything around it together are the ones I want to grow.