Thread by @UnusedPotential

Next up is Tanya Reilly @whereistanya on "Being Glue"

Opening question "Who has felt like they didn't have the technical skills to be in the room?" [lots of hands]...

"Who has surprised themselves by doing the thing anyway?" [lots of hands]

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@whereistanya "My job has 'software engineer' in the title but I do almost no coding"

Tanya wrote 211 lines of code last year.

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She focuses on "Glue" work. Design work, coordinating, meetings, mentoring, coaching.

None of this is writing code, but everyone takes her seriously as engineer.

Because her title "Principle Engineer" gives her technical cred.

Lots of people have careers stalled because they do glue work without fancy titles to support it.

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Story time: "Imagine a software engineer", first day at a new job, out of college a few years.

Team is busy and code base is tough, things take longer than everyone else.

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She feels like maybe she doesn't have the skills.

After a few weeks, a customer has a question about API and she is able to help them out.

After that she identifies another team doing a similar thing and helps people coordinate.

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New people join and she helps re-write the onboarding docs.

People are complaining about how poorly tested stuff is, so she brings together leaders from across the company to create new standards.

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She keeps doing this important work, but not delivering any code. Eventually her calendar is full of meetings [photo of Tanya's actual calendar].

Team is treating her as a lead and here manager is giving her fantastic feedback.

What does the promotion process say?

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Promotion time:

our dev is passed over for promotion because she didn't deliver any of her code. She doesn't qualify as a "senior engineer" because she hasn't progressed technically.

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Important to call out explicitly: the manager should have been informing the dev about her promotion process the whole time. [ed: this is a story about a failure of management]

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When it comes to glue work, women volunteer more often.

Women are also volunteered by others more often (48% of the time)

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if this glue work is something that people won't benefit from, it needs to be shared equally.

if you just let it fall through the cracks, it often gets picked up by a woman [ed: who gets penalized for that]

Our dev got told she should switch to being a product manager. Interesting that it's always about switching roles, never re-assigning the work.

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Don't choose a role because you are scared of the role you want, or because someone thinks you would be better at it.

Choose roles because they let you do what you want to do.

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There's a moment where women move into "non-technical roles" like pm or tpm - then when they want to move back to engineering they are told the are "Not Technical Enough"

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It helps to have a solid tech resume when you transition to a "non-technical" role. If you ever want to come back this will really help you.

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Aside to engineers - stop condescending to your TPMs, they can probably do your job.

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If you find yourself being glue and you want to maintain the technical path, have the career conversation with your manager.

Ask in writing "will I get promoted next cycle?" full stop, end of email.

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Follow up with "what do I need to do to make sure I'm on track?"

try to get that answer in writing too.

This can be your roadmap to the higher position

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getting a useful title gives instant credibility.

"People who say job titles don't matter have privilege not every has access to."

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Generate artifacts that can tell the story of your impact.

Taking meeting notes gets a bad rap, but it's really powerful.

"Why would it be a bad thing to control the history of the meeting?"

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[ed: I started taking meeting notes when I was a consultant and being able to quote people a month later is a super power for convincing them]

If activities aren't helping your career, drop them.

Giving office tours taking away from career goals? Only person answering customer emails? Don't.

Don't worry that you are the only person on the team doing this work

Everyone else has already decided not to

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Step back from diversity work. When you level up to a higher title, this gives you more power for diversity. That's real diversity work

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Three techniques for having more time:

Fake Meetings

Hide (literally)

Apps like Forest (reminds you to be productive in a cute way)

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It's important to make time to do the things you need to do.

if you are coding, you are getting better at coding.

If you are doing glue work, you are only getting better at glue. Make time to learn coding too.

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Learning is something you should do during work. It'll make you better at your job, so it is your job.

If your manager doesn't agree, send them to @whereistanya [ed: and me! >:| ]

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Anecdote from her friend: People asked her to do people communication work because she was good at that.

Friend responded: "Yeah, I'm good at everything I put effort into. You should see me do systems design."

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Slides for this talk will be uploaded here by the end of the day:

github.com/writespeakcode…

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