Glue — Talk by Tanya Reilly
Tanya Reilly from Squarespace gave an amazing talk on 11th July “Being Glue” at the Software Art Thou run by Zendesk. It originated from an internal post and has been well received at many conferences, if you have some time, I recommend taking some time to hear her out especially if you are struggling with your career growth.
Prelude
Every company faces challenges onboarding, new employees, due to fast growth, processes change, and, policies are out of date the moment it is written. While unsuspecting new Software Engineers might think companies like Google, Facebook is well-oiled machines with the best processes, you are in for a surprise. Any successful company has software that is pushed to levels that you never imagined it would be used, a18z calls it the real product-market fit, which means some things have been over-looked and never fixed because there were other higher priority issues.
Elbow grease and duct tape run more successful tech companies than any other technology.
In one of my roles, I manually sent hundreds of thousands of emails to customers via jobs, that were executed manually by jumping into the rails console. More than once I had to manually spread timestamps because API kept breaking. Yes, elbow grease, like a startup, but the cost of fixing it was too high, so someone had to it the ugly way. Most of them were documented in an internal Knowledge Base, but often it is undocumented.
Undocumented Things
So, how do things work at these companies, if some of them aren’t documented or out of date? The try to hire great engineers who care enough and some of them end up being the glue, finding new ways to fix problems, keep the team together by volunteering a lot of their engineering time. Plan the team retreats, talk to customers, perform customer support, help new employees on board by helping them with issues. The important thing to note is: this was never in their job description. Any respectable engineer would do it because it is the right thing to do.
These people work incredibly hard, and their calendar is so booked that they hardly get any time to code. And your Manager insists that he is happy with your performance, so all is good right?
Reality is brutal
Not technical enough? I’m not getting promoted after busting my ass all year? Why didn’t you tell me earlier?
When it comes to promotion cycle, you assume you will get it, be recognised for your effort. But, your manager and management above now claim you haven’t done enough promotable work. Wat? Didn’t I bust my ass? All the glue work you did to make customers happy, plan the retreat, made your team a well-oiled machine? That is not factored in your promotion, it never was. It should be, but it isn’t in most places, for mid-level engineers.
Choices
At this time, you only have a few possible choices, ask your manager clearly “Am I going to be promoted in the next round?”, and if your manager does not seem convinced, ask explicitly what do you have to do to get promoted. Also if managers are reading, specific actionable feedback is important. Don’t tell someone everything is good when it’s not. You are doing a disservice to them. And If you are a manager make sure that the glue work, is distributed evenly. Spread the pain, spread the misery as evenly as possible. This results in a healthier team in the long run.
This suggestion is controversial, as a last resort, stop doing whatever it is you are doing and write code, or do exactly what the career ladder says. I had this realisation a while ago and it’s important to acknowledge its much easier said than done. You got into this mess because you cared, so it’s hard to stop one day.
Unfortunately there are certain things are not conducive to learning from a book and people have to fail and learn from their mistakes.
I see people doing this exact mistake even though they have heard about it in talks or books. Realising and taking action, on the other hand, requires a difficult situation to arise or burnout. Everyone in my support network suggested it, but it took me 6 months take action. But I’m happy I did. Somethings you just have to learn yourself by failing.
If you like it you should get Tanya to speak at your meetup or internal Lunch n Learn. Check her website for more details.
