Discovered: Nov 27, 2024 07:33 Tanya Reilly:: Being Glue — No Idea Blog <– QUOTE: The Awesome Coder only succeeded because someone else on the team went and talked to other people and broke him out of the email thread of doom. He couldn't communicate well enough to ask another team for some data that he needed. ... The System Designer only succeeded because someone else on the team asked what the thing he was building was actually for. He didn't have the technical judgement to step back and understand how his system would integrate with the other systems the company was building and to be clear about the problem they were all solving. ... Should they have been promoted? Are they really senior engineers? I don't think they are. And they won't learn to be if people keep doing their glue for them. They will get better at what they spend time on. The vast majority of their learning will happen on the job. ... Managers: If your job ladder doesn't require that your senior people have glue work skills, think about how you're expecting that work to get done. ... Glue people: push back on requests to do more than your fair share of non-promotable work and put your effort into something you want to get good at.

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