Session Description

Abstract:
We all do things in our day to day work that are deemed ‘non-promotable’ – these are tasks that are crucial for project success but might not get you promoted. This is commonly known as glue work, a term coined by Tanya Reilly. Your first instinct about this could be to drop these tasks immediately, but this might not be the best approach. Being glue doesn’t mean an end to your career, and it isn’t something that you can’t recover from. During this talk, I will use a personal experience to illustrate how I narrowly avoided the trap of being permanently stuck with glue work and how to salvage a situation where you might be in a similar predicament.

Outline:
1. Introduce the concept of glue work

2. Talk about the specific work I was doing and why I started getting concerned
– I didn’t want to do work that wasn’t deemed promotable
– As a woman in engineering, I needed to be extra careful about not doing ‘administrative’ or ‘secretarial’ work

3. How I dealt with it
– Realizing that this could become an issue for my career progression.
– Instead of being reactive and immediately stopping doing these tasks, thinking things through.
– Dealing with it proactively: I immediately talked to my manager and tried understanding how they perceived this work to be.
– Talked to a mentor at my company (a staff engineer) on what their take was. They helped identify a couple of things:

a. If the work that you’re doing isn’t being reflected in your performance evaluations, then that’s a red flag.
b. Try to think about why you’re constantly doing this work? Is it because roles aren’t well defined in your company? They talked about how this job was being done by the project lead in other teams. This helped me realize that the project lead role was very loosely defined within my team, which was part of the reason I was experiencing this.

4. Long term fixes:
– Moving forward, make sure I was as heavily invested in the implementation stages of the project (which requires more technical skills than soft skills).
– Knowledge sharing and mentoring other engineers so the glue work I was doing could be done on a rotational basis within the team.

Key takeaways:
1. Learn to reflect on your day to day work and identify ‘glue work’.
2. Instead of being reactive to ‘glue work’, learn to reflect on how you can mitigate the risks that come with glue work and stay on track with getting promoted.
3. Learn how to leverage your manager, and team members to reduce the ‘glue work’ you’re doing.