Are you a "Glue" employee?
You are in a dangerous zone.
Look around your stand-up meeting. There is likely one person who knows exactly why that legacy API behaves weirdly, even though they didn’t write it. The person who volunteers to onboard the new Junior dev because the Notion docs are from 2021. The person who notices that the Design team and the Backend team are misaligned and sets up a call to fix it before it becomes a disaster.
This person is rarely the “Rockstar” who ships the most complex algorithms. This person is the Glue.
In 2022, Tanya Reilly (Principal Engineer) coined the term “Being Glue” in a seminal talk that changed how we look at engineering careers. Her thesis was brutal but necessary: Glue Work is essential for the success of the team, but it is often fatal for the career of the individual.
1. The Anatomy of Glue Work
What exactly is Glue Work? It is the set of tasks that makes a team successful but is not strictly “shipping code”. Think of a brick wall. The bricks are the features, the code, the shipped products. The mortar is the glue. Without mortar, the wall collapses. But when people admire a wall, they only count the bricks.
You know you are the Glue Employee if you find yourself constantly:
Updating Documentation: Because “someone has to do it”.
Onboarding: Teaching the codebase to every new hire because you are the most approachable.
Unblocking: Debugging other people’s environment issues so they can keep working.
Mediating: Translating between Product Managers and Engineers.
Sentinelling: Catching edge cases in meetings that others missed.
2. The Trap: High Value, Low Visibility
The paradox is that Glue Employees are often the most valuable members of the team. Managers love them because the team runs smoothly. But come promotion time, the conversation often goes like this:
Manager: “You are incredible. The team loves you. But we can’t promote you to Senior yet.”
Glue Employee: “Why? I helped everyone ship their projects!”
Manager: “Exactly. You helped. But you didn’t own a complex technical deliverable yourself. Your coding output is lower than your peers.”
This is backed by research from the University of Pittsburgh (The “No Club” study), which identified Non-Promotable Tasks (NPTs).
They found that these tasks are vital for the organization but carry zero weight in performance reviews. Crucially, they found that women are expected to volunteer for these tasks 44% more often than men, creating a structural barrier to advancement.
3. The Concept of “Technical Capital”
To understand why this happens, we need to talk about Technical Capital. Imagine your career credibility as a bank account.
Every time you solve a hard technical problem, ship a feature, or fix a critical bug, you deposit Technical Capital.
Every time you do Glue Work (meetings, docs, coordination), you are spending time without depositing capital.
The Economic Reality:
Senior/Staff Engineers have a lot of Technical Capital. They can afford to spend it on Glue Work. In fact, doing Glue Work is part of a Senior role (multiplying the team).
Junior/Mid Engineers have empty bank accounts. If they spend all their time on Glue, they go into debt. They become “The person who takes notes”, not “The Engineer who builds systems”.
4. The Strategy: How to Survive Being Glue
If you are the Glue, you don’t need to stop caring. You need to change your strategy based on your level.
For Junior & Mid-Level Engineers: The “Oxygen Mask” Rule
The advice isn’t to be a selfish jerk. It is to follow the airline safety rule: “Put on your own oxygen mask before assisting others.”
Your oxygen is Shipping Code. If you don’t ship, you suffocate.
The 80/20 Rule: Dedicate 80% of your time to your assigned tickets. Only 20% goes to helping others.
Redirect, Don’t Solve: When a new hire asks for help, don’t fix it for them. Point them to the documentation. If the doc is broken, tell them to update it as they learn. That’s how they learn, and how you save time.
Avoid “Housekeeping” Glue: There is “Technical Glue” (Code Review, Architecture Design) and “Housekeeping Glue” (Scheduling meetings, taking notes, organizing team building). As a Junior, aggressively avoid the Housekeeping Glue. It creates zero Technical Capital.
For Senior & Staff Engineers: From “Doing” to “Sponsoring”
At this level, you should be doing Glue Work. But you must ensure it’s visible and strategic.
The Brag Document: Never do Glue Work secretly. Keep a “Brag Doc” where you list every interaction: “Unblocked Team B by fixing the CI pipeline”, “Mentored Alice to ship Feature Y”. Bring this to your performance review.
Sponsorship: Instead of doing the work, sponsor it. If you see a gap (e.g., missing tests), don’t write them yourself. Create a ticket, assign it to a Junior, and mentor them through it. You get credit for leadership; they get credit for the code.
Frame it correctly: Change your vocabulary.
Bad: “I helped with the meeting.”
Good: “I aligned stakeholders to unblock the Q3 roadmap.”
5. A Note for Managers
If you lead a team, identifying your Glue is actually very difficult. Why? Because your dashboards are lying to you. The Glue Employee often has fewer closed tickets than the rest of the team, because they spent their week helping others close theirs.
To find them, ignore the charts and look for the “Vacation Anomaly”:
Who is the person that, when they go on vacation, causes the team to suddenly feel chaotic?
Who is the person mentioned most often in the “Thanks” channel, but least often in the “Shipped Features” channel?
That is your Glue. If you don’t reward them, two things will happen:
Burnout: They will quit because they feel taken for granted.
Regression: When they leave, your team’s velocity will drop mysteriously by 30%, because the “invisible work” is no longer getting done.
Conclusion
Being the Glue is a superpower. It means you understand the system, not just the syntax. But you must be a Strategic Glue.
Don’t let your helpfulness become your handicap. Build your Technical Capital first. Then, and only then, use it to hold the wall together.