The advice on the internet is to focus on your technical skills as a junior engineer.
Leave the meetings to the senior dudes. The only promotable work is the hard skills.
Thatās true.
But how do you find the opportunities to make an impact? Do you just wait?
You need both technical skills and influence
For technical skills, itās clear: Do more code and designs. Read the technical books.
But what if the only work given to you is moving configs around?
And what about gaining influence?
Iām onboarding in a new team and Iām mentoring an engineer who joined out of university a couple of months ago.
What am I doing and recommending to this engineer?Ā Use āglue workā in your favor.
In her famous talk about glue work, Tanya Reilly talks about glue work hurting junior engineers.
Yet, Iām recommending it and doing it myself.
Iām talking aboutĀ glue work as a proxy for influence.
AndĀ influence as the keystone to get opportunities.
In this post, youāll learn
How I stole an opportunity from my Senior engineerās hands.
What Iām doing and I recommend as a mentor.
The tweak to make glue work useful for your career.
How to leave a trail of evidence of your glue work.
š” Why glue work has a bad rep
Being the nice guy or gal wonāt get you promoted.
People promote the engineers who played a key technical role in projects with big impact.
Your glue work doesnāt move the project forward. Only the technical design and code do.
Everyone tells you you need a key technical contribution.
But you are a junior, you are not playing this role yet.
Uhh, we are in a deadlock situation.
With low-complexity tasks, you are making some progress.
But it could be better.
Glue work and technical skills are not exclusive. Donāt go all or nothing into it.
You get good at what you practice.Ā
You need to find a way to practice on the good opportunities
š” Why am I recommending it
āļø Good and bad glue work.
Iām not talking about sacrificing your priorities to help others all the time
Iām talking about leading and raising the bar in your team. Having an eye on things going on. Not waiting for someone else to tell you what to do.
Letās see some examples:
š Bad glue work:
Scheduling all team events.
Reserving all meeting rooms in the office for all the meetings.
Reminding people of their action items.
All these should be a shared burden between team members.Ā
To ease the burden, look for automation opportunities.
ā Good glue work:
Maintaining proper documentation.
Insisting on Operational Excellence standards.
Providing inputs to managers and product managers.
Tracking the progress of projects and calling out when thereās a risk.
Being the Point of Contact to talk with dependencies.
All these are giving you the big picture of the projects. When anyone needs input, you are the first person theyāll think about.
You become the āgo-toā person.
š The āgo-toā person has more opportunities
Who would you soundboard an idea with, the person who provides a holistic answer or another who canāt handle ambiguity and works only on well-defined tasks?
Who is more likely to write the design of a project, the person involved in the requirements scoping or the person coding small tasks?
When your knowledge is useful for others, all opportunities go through you.
This happened to me.
Last year we rearchitected a feature we worked on.
I worked on a previous project touching similar systems. I was on top of this project and communicating the need for this change. It made me a person to participate in the discussions with the most tenured and Senior engineers in my team.
From management, the idea was to request this Senior engineer to support the project. He would reduce the ambiguity and provide a tech design while the team, myself included, focused on something else.
I evaluated multiple solutions and recommended one.Ā Then I told this Senior engineer that I wanted to continue working on writing the technical design.
I saw the opportunity and asked for it.
Glue work has to be selfish.
You give to others, and this causes all opportunities to go through you.
But you canāt stop there and turn your focus on helping someone else. You have to ask for the opportunities you want.
š£ Good glue work leaves evidence
Technical skills are not the only one to create artifacts:
You can make a point of unblocking a project by sharing meeting notes publicly after interacting with your dependencies and stakeholders
You can make a point of reducing operational load by measuring before and after your documentation and operational excellence work
You can make a point of saving several engineering hours by making your built times faster.
You can make a point of helping engineers in their promotion by committing to a mentoring relationship with some people.
Donāt just lend a helping hand and forget about it. Look at what purpose your help serves.
And I donāt mean to be a jerk only helping if you find benefit.
Helping is nice, but you canāt live your life sacrificing to help others.
ā°ļø You get technically competent by challenging yourself
Imagine an engineer doing commits and technical designs all day long.
A 10x engineer. Delivers more code and features than anyone else.
But the features are all the same. The code is almost a copy-paste.
This engineer is doing the same work in their comfort zone.
Operate on the edge of your capabilities to expand that edge.
Even if you have a great manager and tenured engineers, everyone has a lot on their plate to think about you.
The only person that can afford to think about you is yourself.
Choose your opportunities and youāll do better in the long run.
āļø It works if you keep your balance
A promotion needs artifacts. Your work has to leave evidence.
Glue work is hard to reflect in an artifact by itself.
But it's powerful when you take the opportunities this glue work opens.
Reframe your intentions:Ā Donāt help, but lead.
I mean āhelpingā as a selfless act of sacrifice for others.
I mean āleadingā as an act of integrity of following something end to end.
At some point, I was given a heads-up that I may be covering too much for otherās people roles while they were on vacation.
But that work also gave me big opportunities that I could decide to push forward or let go.
I had options. I had agency in my career. I decided.
šÆ Conclusion
At a career event in my company, I remember hearing multiple times:Ā "If you want to grow to the next level, become best buddies with your Manager and Product Manager".Ā
You need to earn their trust for future opportunities, and you need a supportive manager for a promotion.
It doesnāt mean to work with them to transition to their roles unless that's your goal.
It means that when they need an engineer, they think about you over anyone else.
Itās a balance between soft and hard skills.
Donāt sacrifice one in favor of the other.
So what am I doing in my new team and recommending as a mentor?
Documenting whatās not documented.
Auditing whatās forgotten.
Creating a network with the key stakeholders.
Proposing improvements with the willingness to build something, not to destroy what came before.
Even as a junior engineer, the glue work will help you gain influence and obtain more challenging work.
And that challenging work will help you make progress faster.
š Weekly applause
These are some posts I liked during this week:
Becoming an Engineering Manager - Is It For You? by
. It was insightful to see my score in this test. While I think I like the high-level tech IC ladder, itās always good to be open to new perspectives.How To Influence Without Authority by
. As an IC Iām not going to have the authority in most situations. I donāt believe even Senior Engineers have much authority, but rather I see them as counselors to the decision makers. That āconselingā doesnāt mean just stating facts, but knowing how to communicate and advocate for what you believe is right- . The point of the article is how to earn customer trust as the CEO of a company. I read the entire article as how to earn trust of my peers as an engineer. It works exactly the same way.
How I Read Books with Limited Time by
. I think everyone had similar realizations as we read more and more books. I still struggle to drop books, so starting with a summary and some research definitely helps to pick the right books.How do you become the most versatile engineer you can be? by
. I didnāt expect writing online to have such a mindset shift in me. I havenāt tried freelancing or building ārealā projects from zero, but I feel deep down it would help me overcome some fears.
Glue work is an amazing influence builder for Juniors because very few people will show up for it and take the initiative. Leaders will remember that you did.
But this is not exclusive to glue work. In my experience, if some work's considered āmehā, test refactoring, for example, just do it. Those lines were unchanged for 5 years because it's that āmehā code nobody wanted to do, and that will end up for a review in a senior colleague's inbox.
I bet they'll remember your name.
I appreciate the mention, Fran! šāāļø
Fantastic post, Fran. I recently joined a startup and that brings opportunities to thrive in ambiguity, lead projects end-to-end, and becoming a domain expert.
There are other layers like youāve mentioned, that I can use to gain influence: documentation for example, which can always be better and would save engineers time.
I am going to be applying myself in the coming months, and looking forward to progressing further.