From the ExperiencedDevs subreddit, this developer wanted perspective on how to track glue work that holds together different projects.
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Hey folks, we're going to go to the Experience Devs subreddit today. This is about tracking what someone's calling glue work. Sorry, huge truck just blasted past that person and it was very loud. Um, documented glue work, glue work with respect to promotions, rewards, and that kind of stuff. So the context and framing here is like often when we're talking about things like the impact that you're having and you know if you're working towards next level in your role you'll hear things like uh your your visibility the impact you're having and a lot of the times even like in some recent videos I've been saying like you know being able to own sort of like features and to end having impact across uh you know depending on your level like larger and larger surface areas.
And a lot of the time how this ends up looking is saying you know again depending on your level could be something like owning a feature end to end where you're you are responsible for designing getting the feedback on that design getting the signoffs and then implementing that design and depending on again the level and the scope that could be you're leading a project where there's other people involved in contributing to that could be people on your team. If it's an even larger project, it could be coordinating with other teams on those deliverables and then you know seeing that through to completion and then being able to kind of say at the end like here's the metrics for success. Now with with this framing it very much suggests that like your impact is you know quite quite literally the the the project or maybe sets of projects that you're owning like this.
So this person who's writing this Reddit post is asking about like what they're calling glue work. And I don't have obviously the post in front of me as I'm driving here, but they had a a short list of like a couple of examples of like what they mean. And to, you know, to summarize, it's kind of like you're on a team and you maybe you're a subject matter expert in an area, maybe you're not, but you're you're helping other people. So you it's not your project per se, but you might be someone who uh was helping could be even someone more junior where you're like cool like this person is owning this end to end uh because you know it's something they're working on that's going to be helpful you know from your perspective this is going to be something helpful for for their progression maybe towards their promotion that kind of stuff.
And so like you're you you have ways that you can contribute that add a lot of value to what they're doing. And that could be someone more senior. Maybe you're unblocking them on uh their understanding of things. Uh maybe that's you know they have part of their project where you're like cool like uh you know this work item is something that I can actually take on and do and contribute back to the project. uh it could be lots of other much more informal things that happen on a regular basis, right? Like when I think about how this person's describing like glue, um I think about like especially as people become more senior, a lot of the work that they end up doing within teams that is like is truly the nondocumented like not specific you know, work items that show up on the sprint board, but you know, they were helping someone investigate something because they are a subject matter expert because they can go deeper on it.
There's someone who is doing an investigation for a live site issue and you're like, "Cool." Like, uh, I know this one's a complicated one. Like, you're stepping in to help them. Could be someone's, you know, uh there's people who are experiencing some issue with their development setups and you're like helping them debug that stuff because you have a lot of experience doing that and you're able to and it's like all these different ways that that you can basically like if you zoom out from the team and you're looking at how people are operating on the team, the things they're working on, you are contributing back in ways that allow allow the team to be more effective. Right? If you think about it, like a lot of a lot of what I'm describing are ways that as a manager um aside from like focusing on people, specific things or focused on planning, prioritizing that kind of stuff.
When I'm contributing back more directly to the team, it's often things like that, right? Maybe like in my current role, maybe less on subject matter expertise that are super technical compared to like senior people on the team, they're going to know the codebase and stuff infinitely better than me. But there's maybe especially at this point some domain knowledge where there's more junior people on the team and I can say actually like let me walk you through some of this because even though I'm not coding it on a daily basis um I've been around it long enough on the team where I can explain it to you, help you navigate it and then you know in in short order you will be the expert especially compared to me right but point is these are just some examples of like not owning something end to end but still like if you again zoom out it's adding lots of value to how a team operates.
So this person's saying like if I'm doing lots of this stuff like I I guess from their perspective and like I would agree this is important right it is adding value so how do I make sure that this is getting captured how do I make sure there's like visibility into this kind of thing and I I'm going to share like cuz I have kind of conflicting views on this because uh well I'll say outright in my opinion this kind of work is so invaluable that for me personally when I think about managing teams and I think about the value of this kind of thing, this is the kind of thing that I would emphasize as much as I possibly could in terms of how valuable it is.
I think that when you if you only have one person within a team that's doing this kind of thing, like it's a it can be a lot of stress and a lot of pressure on them because like it is so valuable and like there are demands for this kind of thing. Um because it helps unblock people tremendously. the in my opinion if you had everyone on the team that did just a little bit of this you'd like you'd really have a team that is like a lot of multipliers on the team and it would ideally mean that the I don't know the the level of effort the burden this might place on people uh the extra responsibility they might feel from that could be lessened and shared which I think would would be helpful from like I don't know, a pressure perspective. But I I personally think this kind of stuff is is just like wildly valuable.
Um the tricky part is that from my experience like from having been at a startup where especially being there at the beginning and you know helping arguably I would say helping shape a lot of engineering culture there. This would be something that uh I am very much making a lot of noise about saying like you know as people are growing in their level like this is like one of the number one things I'm looking for is people doing this right just finding ways however they can to like you know whatever their skill set expertise happens to be whatever they're leading into they're helping other people around them this is one of the number one things and I say this because like on the technical side of things. I think there's a lot more examples of this kind of thing happening more naturally where people are getting more technical.
They're able to work on more complex things. I think this shows up a like a lot more routinely than some of these like glue work type things and people just keep to themselves and they're delivering on things like I I think you stop scaling that way in terms of like how much influence you have as an engineer. I think it might mean that you're coding more things if you're just like in isolation, but I I think that you lose your your sort of ability to influence and I think that that's a huge part of it. So, um, that's how I've like personally seen things, uh, for the bulk of my career. But I would say especially like I've been at Microsoft now, it'll be 6 years in August. And I think that personally, I think this is something that's really, really, really challenging to to make show up.
So when we're talking about impact and we're talking about like what people have been able to do, I I think especially at higher levels, I think this is what ends up happening is that like it becomes such an expectation that if you're like, well, this person does such a good job of it, it's like, yeah, they're supposed to, so like what else? Um, which is tricky because I think if I were to to give you an example, if I were to talk to someone, if I were to talk to a manager and we were kind of having like, you know, um, say a manager on a different team and we're talking about the impact that our our team members are having and we're trying to, I don't know, learn from each other about like, you know, how are you navigating with your team and stuff?
From my experience in these conversations, people who often talk about some of their highest performing engineers talk about qualities like this where they're saying, you know, this person like what they end up describing is lots of sort of glue work. Yes, of course, they're also owning things end to end. Like that part doesn't go away, but they're doing so much of this glue work. They're helping so many people on their team in different ways because of stepping in. And so what I find tricky is like I hear people talk this way about how invaluable that is. Um and then I and then I feel like in other more uh either more formal or conversations where there's like groups of managers that come together, the the focus ends up being well like what was the what was the you know deliverable that had the measurable impact
in the in the org and I like that's why it's a bit of conflict for Because I think I think that you could have indiv like again this is my opinion. I think that you could have individuals that don't necessarily own one thing end to end and their impact is so tremendous because they were able to step in in so many different places and really help lots of individuals across their different projects. I say this as like as someone who when I think in the in my mind right now not even like for my direct reports I mean but when I think about some of the engineers that I work with at Microsoft where I'm like in my mind these people are like top tier if I'm like what is the project that they're doing you know what's that one big thing I'm like I don't I don't even know if I have that and I still think that this person is Like I'm saying this person.
I mean in a it's it's I'm not calling out one person. I mean I just I I think that a person like this is you know absolutely kickass if they're able to do you know broader surface area like this. Um so to this person's question like how do you how do you document stuff like this? I think there's a handful of different ways, of course. And I have to move over lanes here. And there's so many. There's like military trucks. What are we doing? Give me one sec. How am I going to do this? Am I allowed? Is that like not okay? Like going between like a military convoy or something? I'm from Canada. I'm sorry. Um, I think there's a bunch of different ways to document this. One is definitely making sure that in one-on-one conversations like with your manager that you're finding ways to bring this up, right?
Uh, of course, you and your manager may have conversations about what they expect out of you in terms of deliverables and things like that. And so if you're doing a lot of this kind of work where you much of your time is occupied doing things like this, raise it with them, right? Let them know that you're doing this kind of thing. Um so that you're getting that visibility throughout a you know a period of time. It's not just at the end where you're like, "Cool. The only thing my manager knew I was doing was like some of this feature work for the first time. Let me tell them about all these things and I hope that I can catch up on all them." like no, I would say do it throughout the year as much as you can in 101 ones, especially if that's a lot of what you do.
Um, at Microsoft, we have this thing called perspectives, which is basically peer feedback, uh, which is cool because you can give peer feedback. There's different sections for it that are like uh, you know, what what you're doing well, what you could do better, but this peer feedback is also visible to managers and like it says that as you're submitting it, right? Like this will be visible by managers. So you can request perspectives from other people to to share feedback. Uh so if you don't have such a thing, you may have some type of peer feedback system where you work. Um, if not, I mean, I don't know, like depending on your comfort level with people you've worked with, you if you don't have like a formal thing, maybe you could shoot them a message and just like ask for some written feedback and say like,
"Hey, like would you mind spending a couple of minutes um you know, we we were working you have this project you're doing and uh you know, I I jumped in to help with a few things like uh do you have any any feedback for me on things I could do better, things that were working well, and Would you mind spending a couple minutes to write that down? Right. um you could find different ways like this to document it because like having as a manager if I see things like that like when I'm thinking about perspectives this is such a useful tool for me because yes I have visibility as much as I can into what my team is doing but there's always I've said this a million times there's always going to be so much that I don't directly see right I'm not sitting beside every employee on my team like watching their computer being like, "What are you doing?" Like, um, I know that they're they're doing their work, right?
We we have sync meetings on this stuff. They'll tell me when they're blocked as much as they can, right? Um, they'll tell me when they're hitting milestones on things. So, I have a pretty good idea, but there's always other things that they're helping with or doing that I don't see. And sometimes I'll hear this from other people where they're saying like, "Hey, like so and so on your team was a huge help on this." And I'm like, "Holy crap." Like, that's great to hear. I didn't I didn't know, you know, I didn't know they were doing that. Now that you're mentioning it, I I think that's you makes sense. Like makes sense it'd be a great person to help with that. Um but I don't see everything.
So when people are able to go ask for that peer feedback, especially in this perspective tool we have and I can see that, I'm like, "Okay, awesome." Especially in these like rewards conversations, not only do I get to say like as the manager, here's how I was perceiving things. I can be like uh especially as people's levels get higher. I'm like that's my view, but like you don't want to take my word for it. Here's a list of people that say like all of this awesome stuff. And that could go the same for growth opportunities, right? Like we are as managers responsible for talking about people's growth opportunities. So, if we're saying, you know, we want to put this person up for promotion or however else that's looking, we will be asked like, "Cool, you're saying all this awesome stuff.
Where do you see like their like what's the thing they really need like a thing they need to work on or things they need to work on?" And so, having peer feedback for that kind of stuff is huge uh when it's written down. So, um regular conversations with your manager, bring it up. If you can request peer feedback, do that. Um, in terms of like how do you track this kind of stuff, I think there's a million different tools and you have to find something that works for you. Uh, I know some people that keep draft emails to themsel and so like whenever they can, they just periodically jot a note down in like a temporary draft email. I work at Microsoft. We got tons of tools for this, right? We have loop components. We have one note. We got you keep a word doc. You keep a markdown file.
Whatever. I recommend writing things down so that even if I'm telling you go talk about this with your manager regularly, you don't want to forget. You don't want to forget the things to talk about. So like write them down. Oh, I just realized I didn't take the garbage out. I got to message my wife. Cool. I hope that helps. Um I think there's lots of ways to do it. I think the glue work is some of the most valuable work that you could do within a team personally. Thanks for watching. See you in the next one.