Glue work considered harmful
Glue work 被认为是有害的

“Glue work” is an concept Tanya Reilly came up with in 2019. The idea is that there’s a large amount of unglamorous work that every team needs in order to be efficient: updating the docs and roadmap, addressing technical debt, onboarding engineers, making sure people talk to their counterparts on other teams, noticing strands that are getting dropped, and so on. Practical, naive engineers gravitate to this work because it’s obviously useful, but at promo or bonus time they’re ignored in favor of the engineers who did more visible work (like delivering new features).
"胶水工作"是 Tanya Reilly 在 2019 年提出的一个概念。这个想法是指每个团队为了高效运作都需要大量不起眼但必要的工作：更新文档和路线图、解决技术债务、帮助工程师入职、确保团队成员之间的沟通、注意被遗漏的工作线等。务实且天真的工程师倾向于做这些工作，因为这些工作显然很有用，但在晋升或奖金评定时，他们会被忽视，反而是那些完成更具可见性工作（如交付新功能）的工程师会得到青睐。

I think this concept is excellent. 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. Pure hackers don’t ship. You need to be able to actually deal with the friction in a large organization in order to deliver value.
我认为这个概念非常出色。这也是我一直说交付项目如此困难的原因 - 如果你是那种习惯于低头写代码的工程师，你将缺乏完成实际需要的胶水工作以成功交付任何项目的工具。纯粹的黑客是不会交付项目的。你需要能够处理大型组织中的摩擦，以便交付价值。

So why doesn’t glue work get you promoted, if it’s so crucial to shipping projects? Are companies stupid? Are they deliberately leaving value on the table? No, I don’t think so. Companies don’t reward glue work because they don’t want you prioritizing it. And they don’t want you prioritizing it because they want you shipping features. Glue work is hard. If you’re capable of doing glue work well, they want you to use that ability to deliver projects instead of improving general efficiency.
那么为什么胶水工作不会帮你晋升，尽管它对交付项目如此关键？公司是愚蠢的吗？他们是在故意放弃价值吗？我不这么认为。公司不奖励胶水工作，因为他们不希望你优先考虑它。他们不希望你优先考虑它，是因为他们希望你交付功能。胶水工作很困难。如果你能出色地完成胶水工作，他们希望你运用这种能力来交付项目，而不是改善整体效率。

The core problem is that you’re deciding for yourself what the company needs instead of doing your job. Isn’t it your job to make your team run smoother? No! Your job is to execute the mission of your company’s leadership. It is better to execute that mission at 60% efficiency than to spend all your time increasing efficiency in general (or even worse, to execute some other mission at 100% efficiency). Why? 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.
核心问题在于你自作主张地决定公司需要什么，而不是专注于本职工作。难道你的工作不是让团队运转更顺畅吗？不是！你的工作是执行公司领导层的使命。以 60%的效率执行这个使命，比花费所有时间提高整体效率（或者更糟，以 100%效率执行其他使命）要好。为什么？主要有两个原因：首先，你不可避免地会耗尽，这对所有人都有害；其次，让团队习惯于公司的基础效率水平，比短暂地人为去除摩擦更好。

Should you never do glue work? No, you should do glue work tactically. That is, you should do this kind of extra work for the projects you lead - the projects whose success you’re accountable for - in order to make sure they succeed. You won’t be rewarded for the glue work specifically, but you will be rewarded for the success of the project. For other projects, you should just do your regular job.
你就真的不应该做任何胶水性工作吗？不是的，你应该有策略地进行胶水性工作。也就是说，对于你负责的项目，你应该做这些额外的工作，以确保项目成功。你可能不会因为这些胶水性工作获得奖励，但你会因为项目的成功而获得奖励。至于其他项目，你只需要做好常规工作。

Is this a deeply cynical take about how to succeed in office politics? I don’t actually think so. Large tech companies operate at something like 20-60% efficiency at any given time (as they get larger, they get less efficient)¹. Even knowing that, growing is a deliberate choice: companies grow in order to capture more surface area, since even at a lower efficiency that’s a way to produce much more value. 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).
这是一个关于如何在办公室政治中成功的极度愤世嫉俗的观点吗？我实际上并不这么认为。大型科技公司在任何给定时间的运营效率大约在 20-60%之间（公司越大，效率越低） ¹ 。即便知道这一点，成长仍是一个深思熟虑的选择：公司成长是为了获得更大的业务范围，因为即使效率较低，这也是创造更多价值的方式。如果个人员工愿意通过在胶水性工作上耗费时间，将本地团队的效率提升到 80%或 90%，公司自然会获取这些免费的价值，但他们对长期固化这一点并没有真正的兴趣（因为这依赖于特殊员工以难以获得回报的方式自愿付出，因此并不可持续）。

If you’re one of those exceptional people, congratulations! You can use that power tactically to be a more effective engineer. But you shouldn’t do it all the time².
如果你是这些特别的人之一，那么恭喜你！你可以战术性地使用这种能力，成为一名更高效的工程师。但你不应该一直这样做 ² 。

Update: some interesting discussion of this post on HN and lobsters. I think this comment by friendlysock is particularly good.
更新：在 HN 和 lobsters 上对这篇文章有一些有趣的讨论。我认为 friendlysock 的这条评论尤其精彩。