Glue work considered harmful 胶水作业
sean goedecke 肖恩·戈德克
“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).“粘合工作”是 Tanya Reilly 在 2019 年提出的一个概念。其理念是，每个团队为了提高效率，都需要完成大量不起眼的工作：更新文档和路线图、解决技术债务、引导工程师入职、确保团队成员与其他团队的同事沟通、发现哪些环节被遗漏了等等。务实、天真的工程师会倾向于做这项工作，因为它显然很有用，但在促销或奖励时间，他们却被那些做了更显眼工作（比如交付新功能）的工程师所忽视。
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.我认为这个概念很棒。这就是为什么我一直说项目交付如此困难 ——如果你是那种习惯埋头苦写代码的工程师，你就不会拥有完成成功交付所需的粘合工作所需的工具。纯粹的黑客不会交付产品。你需要能够真正处理大型组织中的摩擦，才能交付价值。
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，如果胶合工作对项目交付如此重要，为什么它却不能让你升职呢？公司是傻子吗？他们是故意不重视价值吗？不，我不这么认为。公司奖励胶合工作 ，不是因为他们不想让你优先考虑它 。他们也不想让你优先考虑它，是因为他们希望你交付功能。胶合工作很难。如果你能做好胶合工作，他们希望你用这种能力来交付项目，而不是提高整体效率。
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，你竟然在为公司做决定，而不是做好自己的本职工作。难道你的工作不是让团队运转更顺畅吗？不！ 你的工作是执行公司领导层的使命。 与其把所有时间都花在提升整体效率上（或者更糟的是，以 100% 的效率执行其他任务），不如以 60% 的效率执行该使命。为什么？主要有两个原因：首先，你不可避免地会精疲力竭，这对每个人都不利；其次，与其在短时间内人为地消除摩擦，不如让你的团队习惯于公司的基本效率水平。
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.你永远不应该做胶水工作吗？不，你应该策略性地做胶水工作。也就是说，你应该为你领导的项目——那些你对其成功负责的项目——做这种额外的工作，以确保它们成功。你不会因为胶水工作而获得奖励，但你会因为项目的成功而获得奖励。对于其他项目，你应该只做你的常规工作。
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).这是对如何在办公室政治中取得成功的极度愤世嫉俗的看法吗？我并不这么认为。大型科技公司在任何时候的运营效率都在 20-60% 左右（规模越大，效率越低） 1 。即使知道这一点，增长也是一个经过深思熟虑的选择：公司发展是为了占领更多的市场，因为即使效率较低，这也是一种创造更多价值的方式。如果个别员工愿意将自己的时间花在粘合工作上，以将当地团队的效率提高到 80% 或 90%，公司会接受这种免费价值，但他们并不真正有兴趣长期锁定这种价值（因为这取决于杰出人士以难以回报的方式自愿奉献时间，因此是不可持续的）。
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.如果你是这些杰出人才中的一员，那么恭喜你！你可以巧妙地运用这种能力，成为一名更高效的工程师。但你不应该总是这样做。
Update: some interesting discussion of this post on HN and lobsters. I think this comment by friendlysock is particularly good.更新： 关于 HN 和龙虾 ，这篇文章有一些有趣的讨论。我觉得 friendlysock 的这条评论特别好。
- See Metcalfe’s law, Reed’s law and Amdahl’s law for the technical reasons why.请参阅梅特卡夫定律、里德定律和阿姆达尔定律以了解技术原因。↩
- Unless you really, really want to (in which case hey, if you’re going into it with eyes open, do what you like).除非你真的非常想这样做（在这种情况下，嘿，如果你睁着眼睛去做这件事，那就做你喜欢的事）。↩
December 16, 2024 │ Tags: tech companies2024 年 12 月 16 日 │ 标签： 科技公司posts │ subscribe │ linkedin │ rss │ read my book about software engineering
• ← How I got promoted to staff engineer twice← 我是如何两次晋升为高级工程师的
• Mistakes engineers make in large established codebases →工程师在大型已建立代码库中犯的错误 →
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See Metcalfe’s law, Reed’s law and Amdahl’s law for the technical reasons why.请参阅梅特卡夫定律、里德定律和阿姆达尔定律以了解技术原因。
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Unless you really, really want to (in which case hey, if you’re going into it with eyes open, do what you like).除非你真的非常想这样做（在这种情况下，嘿，如果你睁着眼睛去做这件事，那就做你喜欢的事）。