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Glue Work Considered Harmful
Why companies don't reward glue work and why you shouldn't do it all the time
It’s why I keep saying that shipping projects is so hard- if you’re the kind of engineer who’s used to just putting their head down and writing code, you won’t have the tools to do the glue work that is actually needed to deliver anything successfully. For two main reasons: first, you’re inevitably going to burn out, which will be bad for everyone; second, it’s better to let your team get used to operating at the base efficiency level of the company instead of artificially removing friction for a brief period. If individual employees are willing to lift their local team to 80% or 90% efficiency by burning their time on glue work, companies will take that free value, but they don’t have any real interest in locking that in for the long term (since it depends on exceptional people volunteering their time in hard-to-rewrad ways and thus isn’t sustainable).
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