# Glue People / Glue Work: A Summary of the Literature ## Origin and Core Concept The term "glue work" was popularized by **Tanya Reilly**, a principal software engineer (formerly at Google SRE for 12 years, then at Squarespace), through her widely-cited talk **"Being Glue"** (presented at Lead Dev New York, Write/Speak/Code, Software Art Thou, and other venues starting around 2017-2019). She later expanded on these ideas in her book *The Staff Engineer's Path*. The core concept: **Glue work** is the essential but often invisible set of tasks that keeps a team functioning -- onboarding junior engineers, updating roadmaps, talking to users, noticing dropped work, reviewing design documents, mediating between groups, mentoring, and ensuring everyone moves in the same direction. These tasks are not "shipping code," but without them, the team fails. Reilly uses the metaphor of a brick wall: the bricks are features and shipped code; the mortar is the glue. When people admire a wall, they only count the bricks. **The central paradox**: Glue work is essential for team success, but it is often **career-limiting** for the individual. People who do it well get pulled further into it, spend less time on visible technical output, and are then told they haven't done enough "promotable work." --- ## Key Sources and Articles ### 1. Tanya Reilly -- "Being Glue" (noidea.dog/glue) The original talk that defined the concept. Delivered at multiple conferences. Key points: - Glue work is expected and safe at senior levels (where you have technical credibility), but dangerous for junior/mid-level engineers who haven't yet built that capital. - Managed deliberately, glue work demonstrates strong technical leadership. Left unconscious, it can push people into less technical roles or out of the industry entirely. - Four-step plan: (1) Have a long-overdue career conversation, (2) Find a title that gives technical credibility, (3) Ensure the job ladder values glue skills, (4) Glue people should push back on doing more than their fair share of non-promotable work. ### 2. Lorin Hochstein -- "Contempt for the Glue People" (surfingcomplexity.blog, 2021) Highlights a 2015 Stanford lecture by then-Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who described "glue people" as "incredibly nice people who sit at interstitial boundaries between groups" but declared "you don't need them at all." Schmidt recounted trying to eliminate them at Novell, and at Google, reviewing every hiring offer to flag anyone who "smelled or looked like a glue person." Hochstein notes the irony: a company that systematically screened out boundary-spanners may have crippled its own coordination ability -- a point underscored by Google's well-documented struggles with messaging services and cross-team alignment. ### 3. Jon Levy / Wall Street Journal -- "The Underrated Power of 'Glue Employees'" (October 2025) Behavioral scientist Jon Levy's book *Team Intelligence: How Brilliant Leaders Unlock Collective Genius* brought the concept into mainstream business discourse. Levy defines **glue players** as team members who multiply everyone else's results through high emotional intelligence, anticipating needs, and putting the team above themselves. Key points: - Glue players leave clues: they organize community efforts, mentor, and coordinate across departments. - Traditional evaluation systems measure only visible outputs (sales closed, code shipped) and miss glue contributions entirely. - Leaders should create peer-nominated "glue awards," ask pulse-survey questions like "Who helped you succeed this quarter?", and tie bonuses to collective team outcomes rather than just individual milestones. - "Good teams might have a star, but extraordinary teams have glue." ### 4. Indra Klavins -- "Glue Players Are a Signal, Not a Strategy" (People Process Things, January 2026) Argues that recognizing glue players is necessary but insufficient. Without redesigning how glue work shows up in roles, expectations, and career paths, organizations reinforce dependency on a few over-functioning individuals. The real leadership question is: **"How do I design a team where glue work is visible, shared, and sustainable?"** This means making invisible work visible, distributing coordination across the team, and aligning glue work with role scope and career stage. If your team depends on glue players, that's a signal -- telling you where the system is thin and where care and coordination are quietly propping things up. ### 5. Giovanni Lagana -- "Are You a Glue Employee?" (The LinkedIn Engineer, February 2026) Introduces the concept of **Technical Capital** -- career credibility that grows with solving hard technical problems and shipping features. Glue work spends time without building capital. Key guidance by career level: - **Junior/Mid engineers**: Follow the "Oxygen Mask" rule -- prioritize shipping code (80%) over glue work (20%). Avoid "housekeeping glue" (scheduling meetings, taking notes) that creates zero technical capital. - **Senior/Staff engineers**: Do glue work, but ensure it's visible and strategic. Keep a "Brag Document." Sponsor rather than do -- create tickets, assign to juniors, and mentor them through it. - **Managers**: Your dashboards are lying. The glue employee often has fewer closed tickets because they spent their week helping others close theirs. If you don't reward them, they'll burn out or leave. ### 6. Luciench -- "The Glue Work Trap: Why Your Best Engineer Looks Like Your Worst Performer" (dev.to, January 2026) Practical guide for managers to detect glue work through data traces: - **Review burden**: An engineer reviewing 2-3x more PRs than everyone else is doing glue work. - **Unblocking pattern**: If someone's name keeps appearing when people need help, that's glue work. - **Onboarding load**: If every new hire gets paired with the same person, that's glue work. - **Cross-team coordination**: Time spent in other teams' meetings is glue work that doesn't show up in your team's metrics. - Recommendation: Adjust sprint capacity for engineers doing glue work, have explicit conversations that glue work won't hurt career trajectory, and distribute it more evenly. - "Glue work is career-making if it's visible. It's career-ending if it stays invisible. As a manager, making it visible is your job, not your engineers'." ### 7. NearForm -- "Recognising the Importance of Glue Work" (2021) NearForm created a **Delivery Architect** role based entirely on glue work, recognizing that "the ultimate form of software engineering is team architecture." Key argument: as long as developers aren't rewarded for non-technical work and managers fail to distribute glue work fairly, developers will burn out and organizations will lose good people. ### 8. NodeOps -- "The Hidden Glue Work Holding Most Modern Developer Stacks Together" (January 2026) Focuses on the technical side of glue work: the scripts, bots, cron jobs, ad-hoc dashboards, and private spreadsheets that keep modern multi-tool stacks coherent. This glue work falls into a no-man's-land -- not glamorous product development, not formally on the platform roadmap, and not recognized as leadership. Engineers carrying glue work bear a hidden on-call load, and this reactive "toil" often exceeds the SRE-recommended 50% threshold without anyone realizing it, because it isn't tracked. ### 9. Systemic Engineering -- "Glue Engineering: Let's Name the Elephant" (February 2026) Frames glue work as **continuous alignment** -- akin to CI/CD for human systems. Teams are distributed systems where each actor has their own local copy of reality; glue work keeps those copies in sync. When the glue engineer leaves, meeting facilitation breaks down, documentation becomes write-only, and calendars rot. Proposes "alignment-as-a-service" as a formalized practice and calls for making glue work legible as a discipline. ### 10. Aaron Li -- "Why Glue Work Makes Better Software Product Teams" (dev.to, January 2025) Practical case study from Money Forward, showing how a team lead used glue work (proactive communication, listening to barriers, creating bottom-up collaborative environments) to successfully drive AI tooling adoption. Glue work turns a group of talented individuals into a high-performing team. ### 11. CTCO Blog -- "Being Glue in Software Engineering: When Technical Leadership Becomes Your Superpower" (July 2025) Reframes glue work as high-leverage leadership: communication, relationship building, problem framing, knowledge dissemination, and architectural stewardship. Reduces coordination waste, accelerates delivery by preemptively aligning priorities, and amplifies technical leadership capacity. --- ## The Gender Dimension This is one of the most extensively researched aspects of glue work: ### The "No Club" Research (Babcock, Recalde, Vesterlund -- University of Pittsburgh) - Identified **Non-Promotable Tasks (NPTs)**: work vital to organizations but carrying zero weight in performance reviews. - Women volunteer for NPTs **48% more often** than men. - Managers assign NPTs to women **44% more frequently** than to men. - In mixed-gender groups, men delay volunteering, assuming women will step up. - Women perform approximately **200 more hours of non-promotable work per year** than men. - Their book *The No Club* argues women must learn to say "no" without guilt, but the responsibility shouldn't rest solely on women -- organizations must redesign how NPTs are distributed and valued. ### Broader Implications - Glue work reinforces stereotypes about "women's work" (care, relationships, collective) vs. "men's work" (performance, rationality, competitiveness). - Women who say no to glue work are judged more harshly than men who refuse. - This creates a double bind: do the glue work and hurt your career, or refuse it and face social penalties. - Research from the University of Wisconsin (Schauer et al., 2025) confirms that women on engineering design teams disproportionately take on non-technical roles, and that such roles are systematically devalued. --- ## The Eric Schmidt Episode The 2015 Stanford lecture by then-Google CEO Eric Schmidt (highlighted by Lorin Hochstein) provides a stark corporate counterpoint. Schmidt described "glue people" as nice, loyal, but unnecessary -- people who "sit at interstitial boundaries between groups" and "slow everything down." He recounted trying to eliminate them at Novell and implementing a policy at Google where every hiring offer was reviewed and anyone who "smelled or looked like a glue person" would be flagged. This attitude -- contempt for the very coordination work that enables large organizations to function -- stands in direct opposition to the research consensus on glue work's value. --- ## Key Themes Across Sources 1. **Invisibility**: Glue work doesn't show up in metrics, dashboards, or status reports. The most successful outcome of glue work is often "nothing bad happened" -- which is inherently hard to measure. 2. **Career risk**: For junior and mid-level engineers, doing too much glue work is career-limiting. For senior engineers, it's expected and safe (because they already have technical credibility). The same work has different consequences depending on your level. 3. **Concentration effect**: When glue work isn't named, scoped, or distributed intentionally, it concentrates on a few people who care or are capable. Over time, they become "the glue" -- and then burn out or leave. 4. **Gender inequity**: Women disproportionately shoulder glue work, creating a structural barrier to advancement. This is both a cause and a consequence of the devaluation of "care" work. 5. **Organizational fragility**: When glue people leave, the impact is often a "stealth disaster" -- things silently stop working well. Meeting facilitation breaks down, documentation rots, cross-team alignment collapses. 6. **Recognition is necessary but not sufficient**: Naming and rewarding glue players isn't enough. Organizations must redesign roles, expectations, and career paths so that glue work is visible, shared, and sustainable -- rather than relying on individual heroics. 7. **Glue work as leadership**: At its best, glue work is technical leadership -- the force-multiplying activities that make everyone else more effective. The challenge is making it legible as such. --- ## Practical Recommendations ### For Individuals - Be aware of how much glue work you're doing relative to promotable work. - At junior/mid levels, protect your technical capital (the "oxygen mask" rule). - Keep a "Brag Document" to make glue work visible. - Sponsor rather than do: delegate and mentor others through glue tasks. - Have explicit career conversations with your manager about the balance. - Push back on doing more than your fair share of non-promotable work. ### For Managers - Don't rely on dashboards alone -- they miss glue work entirely. - Look for data traces: PR review volume, who people mention when they need help, who onboards new hires, who attends cross-team meetings. - Adjust sprint capacity for engineers doing significant glue work. - Distribute glue work deliberately; don't rely on volunteers (who will disproportionately be women). - Make glue work visible in performance reviews and promotion criteria. - Have explicit conversations that glue work won't hurt career trajectory. - Consider creating formal roles (like NearForm's "Delivery Architect") that recognize glue work. ### For Organizations - Redesign evaluation systems to value coordination, not just individual output. - Create peer-nominated recognition for glue contributions. - Tie compensation and bonuses to team outcomes, not just individual milestones. - Ensure career ladders value glue skills at every level. - Rotate coordination responsibilities so knowledge spreads. - Protect glue people from becoming bottlenecks by distributing the load. - When glue people leave, treat it as an organizational failure, not a personnel matter. --- ## Sources - Reilly, Tanya. "Being Glue." noidea.dog/glue. Lead Dev New York (2019), Write/Speak/Code, Software Art Thou. - Reilly, Tanya. *The Staff Engineer's Path.* O'Reilly Media, 2022. - Hochstein, Lorin. "Contempt for the Glue People." surfingcomplexity.blog (2021). - Levy, Jon. "The Underrated Power of 'Glue Employees' Who Hold Everything Together." *Wall Street Journal* (October 2025). Interview by Heidi Mitchell. - Levy, Jon. *Team Intelligence: How Brilliant Leaders Unlock Collective Genius.* - Klavins, Indra. "Glue Players Are a Signal, Not a Strategy." People Process Things (January 2026). - Lagana, Giovanni. "Are You a Glue Employee?" The LinkedIn Engineer (February 2026). - Luciench. "The Glue Work Trap: Why Your Best Engineer Looks Like Your Worst Performer." dev.to (January 2026). - NearForm. "Recognising the Importance of Glue Work." nearform.com (2021). - NodeOps. "The Hidden Glue Work Holding Most Modern Developer Stacks Together." nodeops.network (January 2026). - Systemic Engineering. "Glue Engineering: Let's Name the Elephant." systemic.engineering (February 2026). - Babcock, Linda, Maria P. Recalde, and Lise Vesterlund. *The No Club: Where Women Navigate and Break the Bias.* 2022. - Babcock, Recalde, and Vesterlund. "Why Women Volunteer for Tasks That Don't Lead to Promotions." *Harvard Business Review.* - Fortuna, Andrea. "Glue Employees Hold Teams Together." andreafortuna.org (December 2025). - Ezekiel, Elaine. "Who's Doing the Glue Work at Your Company?" Atomic Object (2023). - Fellow.ai. "A Guide to Understanding Glue Work." (September 2025). - Schauer, Anastasia M., et al. "Internal and external influences on role stereotype adherence and gender dynamics on engineering design teams." *International Journal of STEM Education* (2025). - Smith, Sarah. "Women in IT: Don't Get Stuck in 'Glue Work'." *Computing* (2021). - Li, Aaron. "Why Glue Work Makes Better Software Product Teams." dev.to (January 2025). - CTCO Blog. "Being Glue in Software Engineering." (July 2025). - Crittenden, Mike. "Glue Work Is Career Limiting." critter.blog (2022). - Berezovsky, Olga. "When Great Work Isn't Enough." dataanalysis.substack.com (2025). - Forte Foundation. "Don't Get Stuck: How Being Too Helpful Can Cost You a Promotion." (2021).