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Put this in a frame.
If you’re not being recognized for your work that’s a leadership problem. Stiff arming work feels like a way towards an ossified lumbering work culture.
on one hand it does seem a bit messed up - this was not in my "job description", so it was technically unpaid work that was nevertheless a formal part of my expectations. but on the other hand I really liked working in an environment where everyone spent some of their time and effort to improve things for everyone.
also making it an explicit requirement for everyone to do at least attempted to circumvent the more toxic culture of "I am a rockstar engineer and I'm busy doing important things, someone else can do the glue work". not to mention that "someone else" usually ended up being a woman, and that she was almost certainly getting paid less than said rockstar engineer.
the OP's implication is that the company should have formally hired someone to do all the glue work, but it is usually made up of enough diverse pieces that it would be practically impossible to hire a single person to do it - e.g. what sort of job title would cover "write documentation, interview software engineers, and organise a team off-site"? but those were all tasks that needed to be done and the citizenship requirement let the burden be distributed more fairly.
I think a better way to put it is not "don't do glue work" but "don't be the only chump doing unrewarded glue work", i.e. to push for a company culture where everyone is expected to do some of it and where it is formally recognised as work.
Not to be sarcastic but just to offer an observation: in a sufficiently large or bureaucratic organization, preventing an incident from happening can rarely get you any credit or visibility. Such achievement falls into the bucket of "what you're supposed to do". So, those who navigate company dynamics well would rather let the incident happen and then be loud on the follow-up action items. The trick is not to turn an incident into a diaster, so it's a dedicate act.
If you save a sales deal, they'll cheer the sales staff. And pay them a commission, which you will receive no part of.
If you let a few things burn down, your boss's boss's boss will notice the fire, and things may improve. It's perhaps the easiest way you have of communicating with them.
Your mental energy deployed at work is not so dissimilar: keeping some in the tank gives you the option to deploy it strategically, rather than risking your health (burnout) when something unexpected comes up.
If you join a group in one of these games with a player who is bad at managing their mana, you’ll also find that they’re not such great teammates, either.
Unfortunately very few jobs are structured to take advantage of that. So many blockers and distractions from you getting into actual deep work.
It was a bit ironic though, as most of the work I did during that time was ultimately shelved, as I can tell by looking up public DNS entries, probably due to other people exiting or the team being reorganized.
Most people either want hypergrowth idiocy or to be bought by the people doing hypergrowth idiocy.
Setting consistent expectations means you can plan, you can actually reasonably budget, you can have predictability in your business dealings - if you are trying to run a good business these are all real features instead of "puts out more code that might or might not make us money, but at least we were pulling all nighters and adding perceived meaning to our lives!"
Doing a little bit of "glue work" can make you indispensable and also a hero to your team if it makes everyone's work life a whole lot better and no one else knows how to do it.
I've been focused on going out/socializing more which is unfortunately distracting me in life, all I can think about is going out getting laid
Running anything at constant 100% utilization means you are going to be working in crisis mode all of the time. Even in factory labor, the Toyota Way is several decades old now, and it involves making sure everyone has at least a little breathing room to step back and think about what they're doing. And obviously this is even more important for "knowledge workers" or anyone whose output requires any amount of creativity.
High functioning organizations have a good (not too much, but not too little) amount of slack in their work pipelines. Pretty sure there is not a single person with an MBA (or, lol, any consultants) that knows this anymore.
It also sounds a lot like getting pulled into meetings. People complain about it, but sometimes that’s the job.
It's going to take time to earn trust from peers and your manager to start getting more meatier work. If you're early career, I think 2 years is a good guideline. Many places hiring someone for their second job will expect you to be leaving your first job around 2-ish years. 2 years gives you the chance to take on larger projects and see the results of your work and get feedback about things you've pushed to production.
You probably shouldn't stay at your first job more than 3 or 4 years. The second job change is the hardest. It's when you realize that different companies do and value things differently. Staying too long at your first job will make it tougher to adjust. It's also good to get exposure to new ways of working while you're still agile enough to soak it up.
If you've left more than 2 or 3 jobs within 2 years it starts to look like a red flag.
For the first 10 years or so, this is relevant. After that you can figure out what you really want to do.
Early career pick learning and exposure to different technologies, processes, and company organizations.
That being said, this job market is pretty bad for the youngins so unless you are top 1% of noobs I would say focusing on stability and learning would be my north stars in the next 3 years.
One that is very important: Do you have another opportunity to accept? There is nothing better to get a job than being employed.
If you do have a offer, consider if you take; but if you don't, try to get one while you are employed and jump ship when it's a better one; repeat.
One common misconception the article touches on, for example, is that Jira tickets represent latent task assignments, such that you should always be working on some specific Jira ticket and immediately pick up a new one when you finish or are awaiting review on the last one. That's not how the most successful engineers work, and often it's not even really what management wants.
I've found that most of that autonomy comes with trust, and that trust gets unlocked via good relationships, and good relationships get unlocked by a history of good communication.
You are 100% correct that every person has agency, the trick is to get yourself into a social dynamic where it is acceptable to assert it.
Proactive vs reactive
But understand the ecosystem. People make promises that arent entirely dependent on them to be able to deliver
Definitely! It's been that way everywhere I've ever worked. Unless you are churning out code at maximum speed then it's only a matter of time before you get fired.
Otherwise I don't see why you couldn't do lower value tasks with flexibility to abandon them if something higher value comes up