{"text":[[{"start":6.5,"text":"Are you the person who takes the time to explain to new hires on your team what everyone does? Are you the person who notices when a project is in danger of going wrong because two teams have different ideas of what is actually required? Do you know the name of the person on the third floor who can sort out the fiddly problem that has slowed down your colleague for weeks? "}],[{"start":30.05,"text":"If you answered yes to most of these questions, then you are doing “glue work”: you build relationships with people; you can see the bigger picture; you fix the organisational cracks and help to hold projects together."}],[{"start":43.65,"text":"In 2019, a principal software engineer called Tanya Reilly coined the term “glue work” in a talk and blog post that has become something of a seminal text in the profession — I suppose because so many people recognised the truth of it. “Glue work is expected when you’re senior,” she wrote, “and risky when you’re not.”"}],[{"start":62.25,"text":"But why? And is that still the case? One of the most fascinating impacts of AI on the tech sector is the way it has begun to transform the relative value of glue work. It may soon do the same in other professions, too."}],[{"start":75.4,"text":"Reilly’s argument almost seven years ago was that these skills were vitally important in her industry but chronically undervalued. She said that while senior people were expected to do some glue work (and some people’s jobs, like project managers, largely consisted of it), sometimes more junior engineers found themselves doing a lot of it because they were good at it and nobody else was bothering."}],[{"start":96.5,"text":"This could be terrible for their careers because it meant they spent less time writing code, which was the technical skill most often rewarded and promoted. “Doing glue work too early can be career limiting, or even push people out of the industry,” she wrote. “It’s ironic. We lose good engineers because they happen to also be good at other skills we need.”"}],[{"start":116.75,"text":"Seeing glue work as “non-promotable” has another consequence, of course. It means the people who are promoted into managerial roles on the basis of their core technical prowess don’t necessarily have any experience of — or interest in — the leadership and interpersonal skills that are suddenly required of them in their new roles. That does not generally augur well for their underlings or their organisation."}],[{"start":141.75,"text":"I suspect the same dynamic occurs in a number of different professions that value certain “core” skills highly, from academia to law. And it is worth acknowledging that there is a gender angle here, too. "}],[{"start":153.2,"text":"I personally am not a glue person — I am more of a “please leave me alone to do this one thing I really love” sort of person. But in very general terms, research suggests that women are more likely than men to volunteer for — or be volunteered for — “non-promotable” glue work. Indeed, a few years ago four female academics wrote a book that documented this phenomenon thoroughly. They called it The No Club, which pretty much sums up their advice."}],[{"start":182.1,"text":"But is that still good advice? In software engineering, the core technical skill of writing code has suddenly been replicated by machines. What is left is the ability to manage AI agents, to carefully document the wider context for them, to co-ordinate, to see the customer’s needs and the bigger picture. In other words, what is left is the glue work. “Now, those are the most important skills. In fact, those are the skills,” Brittany Ellich, a staff engineer at GitHub, tells me. “People who were more familiar with those skills, doing that background work, are having an easier time . . . I think some of the folks having a harder time, from talking to colleagues, are people who identified themselves as . . . writing really good code.”"}],[{"start":224.89999999999998,"text":"It is a reminder that new technology doesn’t just displace jobs or tasks and leave everything else unchanged. It can radically change the way different skills are valued within an organisation or profession, too. In the case of software, it is doing so at a disorienting pace. In other professions I think it will happen more slowly. In some, where the perceived-to-be-core skill remains unautomatable, perhaps not at all. "}],[{"start":251.95,"text":"Regardless, now is a good time for managers everywhere to ask themselves a few questions. Who is doing the glue work on your team? Are you giving them credit and promotion for it? Are you making sure everyone is learning how to do some of this work? Because in the tech sector, AI hasn’t suddenly made those skills valuable to organisations — they always were. It has just made the fact impossible to ignore."}],[{"start":280.25,"text":""}]],"url":"https://audio.ftcn.net.cn/album/a_1776743420_7751.mp3"}