Contempt for the glue people

https://surfingcomplexity.blog/2021/08/28/contempt-for-the-glue-people/

by jakelazaroff • 2 years ago

54 40 2 years ago

croes2• 2 years ago

The glue people are incredibly nice people who sit at interstitial boundaries between groups, and they assist in activity. And they are very, very loyal, and people love them, and you don’t need them at all.

Eric Schmidt

Machine men, with machine minds and machine hearts! You are not machines, you are not cattle, you are men

Charlie Chaplin

barrkel2• 2 years ago

Product managers, technical program managers. You know. Glue people.

llm_trw• 2 years ago

CEOs too.

firesteelrain2• 2 years ago

I didn’t take those roles as glue people. I took it as people who were technically adept but facilitators.

barrkel2• 2 years ago

I don't think they're quite glue people in the way that Schmidt seems to have meant, but they're definitely people on the edge of teams that interface between different groups of people - PMs interface with sales, support, customers and development, while TPgMs interface with different technical teams to coordinate a bigger effort. They definitely glue different teams together into a common effort.

I'm not wholly sure what Schmidt meant. Maybe vague hangers-on people who kind of dip in and out of things and cheerlead, and take a bit of credit for every project they have a finger in, but not doing any significant lift? I'm not sure at all though. I'm just trying to rationalize it.

exitb• 2 years ago

In a way it’s not surprising that a company that has such a wonky product strategy as Google, hates product people.

hagbard_c• 2 years ago

Extinction Rebellion, Letzte Generation, Just Stop Oil. You know, Glue people.

PaulHoule5• 2 years ago

It’s a fairly major problem that people look to Google as a center of management and technical excellence while it is not and hasn’t been since 2007 or so.

The last person I respected there was Matt Cutts for his combination of public relations and “make the freaking training set at all costs” mentality that separates the people who make working ML models from the rest. Google doesn’t give that to the world, no it gives us Kubernetes and OKRs to kill startups which could be potential competitors. (Sorry when product-market-fit is job #1, #2, #3 and #4 you can’t waste 30 seconds on a system which will twist all your productive people into knots while giving narcissists free reign to determine how they and others are perceived by the organization.)

bezier-curve2• 2 years ago

I don't care how rich he is, he's wrong. Companies need people at the boundaries of context to clue people in, especially at the rate companies like Google lay people off.

PaulHoule5• 2 years ago

Yeah, about those layoffs. There is heavy coverage of Intel’s plans to lay off 14k a year. People fresh out of college might be impressed but if you’ve been around you’d know they lay off 10k people every few years like clockwork.

It’s enough that it’s the last place I’d want to start a job at because I could get laid off just as soon as I start.

bezier-curve2• 2 years ago

I just don't understand the romanticism that's been cultivated with joining these large companies. I interviewed with Google after they reached out to me many years ago, because I had a chrome extension that someone noticed. At the time I thought that was cool. They rejected me because I was anxiously preparing for it the wrong way. That's part of my bias here as well - they didn't need to reach out to someone self-taught. But looking back, I think of all of the things the recruiter was telling me, and the arrogance of them just name dropping "google" and expecting me to bow, and I think bullet dodged. Employment is a social contract just as much as a legal one, and it goes both ways.

hi-v-rocknroll• 2 years ago

Yep. He's partially wrong. Corporations who stop using small, effective teams and instead hire like mad do end up with management meeting communication facilitators who don't do anything all that essential and end up with excessive layers of management. These are the people companies need less of. What companies need more of is secretaries and people who keep things humming to free up subject matter experts from doing low-value tasks, and people who don't fit neatly in a single, narrow role but demonstrably make things better.

Another way out to avoid laying off or not giving raises to essential employees is better performance management with qualitative and quantitative recognition and characterization without creating specific KPIs falling into Goodhart's law. Peer 360 evals that feed into performance reviews for cross-functional areas to show their strengths when they're supposed to be strong in that area. Also, there should be some discretion given to managers to advocate for staff who improve performance of the team or of multiple teams.

surgical_fire• 2 years ago

When I read of things Eric Schmidt and others of his ilk say, the most generous reading I can make is that they are imbeciles. People so utterly disconnected from the realities of work, of how normal people operate, and due to being unfathomably rich, they imagine that their wealth is proof of their superior intelligence. The fact that no one typically confronts their bullshit only reinforces this vicious cycle.

And I say this, because the least generous reading I can make, and the one I think is true, is that they are all sociopaths.

PaulHoule5• 2 years ago

Right. Google is successful because it had the right stuff at the right time to get a monopoly in a two sided market.

Some people think they’ll learn something useful at Google but it’s a delusion because you can’t take the monopoly is useful.

If you’re not reflexively deferential it looks like they pay people 2-3x to be 1/3 as productive as they would be in a startup but they can get away with that because the cash flow productivity is magnified by their profitability and scale.

As for “sociopath”, see OKRs. I can’t think of a better weapon sociopaths could use against the rest of us.

delichon• 2 years ago

  OKRs comprise an objective (a significant, concrete, clearly defined goal) and 3–5 key results (measurable success criteria used to track the achievement of that goal).

Can you please describe the association between requiring objective measurable criteria for a project and sociopathy? It's not at all clear to me.

nynx2• 2 years ago

I think they are correct. I’d say it’s easy to work all your life in the shadow in the cave and never realize that you can do everything yourself. You don’t need “glue” people or project managers.

resoluteteeth• 2 years ago

What is "you" here? If "you" are a single developer or founder of a small startup making a single product then sure, "you" might not need any of these things.

But I think the point of the article is that Google seems to have pretty serious problems stemming from the fact that it apparently has lots of individual teams working on their own thing without enough coordination with each other.

nynx2• 2 years ago

I don’t think google’s problem is a necessary outcome of relying on engineers for the glue and project planning/management. In fact, Google does not do that. They’re full of glue people.

dcminter• 2 years ago

At last I understand how Google's messaging product strategy went so far off the rails...

hprotagonist2• 2 years ago

The second thing is, I think, the problem of personality defects. Now I'll cite a fellow whom I met out in Irvine. He had been the head of a computing center and he was temporarily on assignment as a special assistant to the president of the university. It was obvious he had a job with a great future. He took me into his office one time and showed me his method of getting letters done and how he took care of his correspondence. He pointed out how inefficient the secretary was. He kept all his letters stacked around there; he knew where everything was. And he would, on his word processor, get the letter out. He was bragging how marvelous it was and how he could get so much more work done without the secretary's interference. Well, behind his back, I talked to the secretary. The secretary said, ``Of course I can't help him; I don't get his mail. He won't give me the stuff to log in; I don't know where he puts it on the floor. Of course I can't help him.'' So I went to him and said, ``Look, if you adopt the present method and do what you can do single-handedly, you can go just that far and no farther than you can do single-handedly. If you will learn to work with the system, you can go as far as the system will support you.'' And, he never went any further. He had his personality defect of wanting total control and was not willing to recognize that you need the support of the system.

You find this happening again and again; good scientists will fight the system rather than learn to work with the system and take advantage of all the system has to offer. It has a lot, if you learn how to use it. It takes patience, but you can learn how to use the system pretty well, and you can learn how to get around it.

Hamming, “You and your research”

Astronomers saw me that way. "Cliff? He's not much of an astronomer, but what a computer hacker!" (The computer folks, of course, had a different view: "Cliff's not much of a programmer, but what an astronomer!" At best, graduate school had taught me to keep both sides fooled.)

Cliff Stoll, “Cuccoo’s Egg”

NathanielBaking• 2 years ago

If you look at sports, it used to be that people looked at basic stats for hiring. Then came the age of money-ball where people started looking at group success. Turns out that those people are often quite valuable even though their metrics might not be as sexy.

tpmoney2• 2 years ago

An unfortunate consequence of the highly metric driven world we live in is that the big picture people seem to only have a big picture with respect to the metrics.

I worked in Apple retail way back when, and had a co-worker who was the absolute best "customer service" person I have ever worked with. They had an unnatural ability to make anyone both calm and if not happy, then at least open to talking. Our store was 45 feet from front to back and on multiple occasions I watched them intercept an angry customer who had practically torn the door from its hinges walking in and by the time they'd reached the back where the "Genius Bar" was, they'd gotten the customer cooled down and in many cases actually smiling and laughing. As the retail management became more and more metric focused, they were constantly in the lower rankings for metrics, and yet I argued to anyone I could that they were an essential part of what made our store work and we needed to keep them around regardless of their metrics. Eventually I left because of the ever increasing focus on metrics, and a few months later I heard from them that they'd also been let go for failing to meet metric targets. The few occasions I've been back to my old store, the lack of happy or at least content people waiting around for their turn for service has been noticeable (at least to me in comparison).

I've seen things similar to this play out multiple times over my career. Too strong a focus on numbers and "objective" measurements, and not enough focus on soft skills and overall cohesion and how people fit into their teams. A team of 3 10x developers that don't mesh well on their own with a 1x developer who keeps them all working together smoothly by being a "glue" person is worth more than a team of 4 10x developers that only mesh ok. Everyone I've ever talked to in life understands this concept, and can easily think of examples from their own life. Yet somehow the lesson flies out the window anytime it comes to making hiring / promotion / firing decisions. I think people are afraid to make decisions like that which they can't back up with cold hard numbers, and while there's good reasons to want objective numbers for these decisions and avoid appearances of bias and favoritism, we lose a lot if we only ever focus on the tiny slivers of things which we are currently objectively measuring.

kylecazar• 2 years ago

I think it's fine (necessary?) to have people who fill gaps, it keeps morale high when everyone is spread paper thin. But it's better for those same people to ALSO have some core competencies in which they are capable of diving deep and being a direct contributor.

tpmoney2• 2 years ago

I think the mistake often made is people think that "filling in the gaps" isn't a core competency in which one can dive deep. I once had the pleasure of working at a position with a "SME" type person who was the sort of person that loved writing and collating documentation about things. If you ever had a question about what led to a decision 5 years ago, or how two parts of the system interacted with each other, or where the original specification for the obscure data format we were parsing cam from, they were the person to go to. They somehow managed to accumulate the sort of internal knowledge base that most companies only ever dream of, and very few ever get close to no matter how many Confluence seats they buy or wiki servers they stand up. They knew exactly who to talk to about any given part of the system if they didn't have the answers themselves. They were not a technical person, they couldn't write a line of code, they weren't a customer facing role, they weren't a manager. But filling in all of the gaps between all of those things was something they did extremely well, and there was more than enough depth there to make a career out of. I've never had such a person on my teams before or since, though I often strive to be at least 10% of the person they were for my teams because what they provided was invaluable to anyone with eyes to see it for what it was.

lores• 2 years ago

The glue people are the cross-domain experts, the ones that stop the really deep one-domain experts from doing something bone-headedly naive and tie everything and everyone up coherently. They're infrastructure, so get no glory, but are as vital to a corp as a reliable network or a security engineer. Schmidt is such a sociopath.

croes2• 2 years ago

I think the German national Football team of 2014 would beg to differ.

Lukas Podolski played only 56 minutes but was important to the team at such a glue people position.

You need people you like at your workplace.

robertclaus• 2 years ago

I lead a team of engineers at a company that lacks many glue people at the moment due to rapid growth. My experience is that when you don't have these people it means everyone else needs to fill the gap for Cross-Team communication. (Or develop silos) That's a huge time sink beyond a certain scale - developers stuck in meetings all the time instead of getting their work done. I think managers like glue people because they see them as work multipliers by freeing up the rest of the team.

Obviously the ideal answer is to have teams do better work and documentation to reduce the need for cross team communication, so I can see where a "no glue people stance" could come from, but at most mid size companies I think its at odds with the business velocity demands.

usernamed72• 2 years ago

Can I ask - is the lack of glue an active pain? Is the pain so great that you would go and hire for a glue person or purchase software or services to increase the glue? You clearly recognize the problem and inefficiencies that arise from not having it. If glue really is a work multiplier, what would be the velocity/dollar value for your team to have it?

usernamed72• 2 years ago

This is on-par with calling neuron connections useless in the brain. Which is on-point because this is actually a dumb idea.

glue people connect facts and context and teams and plans. They make sure resources are effectively utilized. Actively trying to remove cohesion from a company is like running an engine without lubricant. Super dumb.

I've been the glue. I didn't want to be glue, I wasn't hired to be glue and I do not wake up every morning to be glue. But I glue because I care about optimizing for results and it's the fastest way from A->B. Eric Schmidt doesn't know what he's talking about.

game_the0ry• 2 years ago

This is my first time hearing the term "glue people" but they sound like a subset of "personality hires." [1] I get why IC technical types would have resentment towards them. I do too.

IMO experience, the defining attribute of these people is that they give emotional comfort to insecure management. Having an org cheerleader around when times are difficult will help make a CEO feel warm and fuzzy inside and help to drown out the discontent.

The good ones are not entirely useless, sometimes they can facilitate org progress in ways others are unwilling or not capable of doing. But at worst, they can create more inefficiency then they solve.

The true mark of a person's value to an org is - in their absence, do things get better or worse? I have seen highly paid "glue people" leave and things actually get easier and better - those people are often forgotten quickly too.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personality_hire

cvadict• 2 years ago

Well Google's garbage-tier product cohesiveness makes a LOT more sense now.

mrshu• 2 years ago

Almost feels like there must be a ton of Glue People at places like Apple!

baazaa• 2 years ago

In social network theory it's commonly noted the disproportionate power wielded by 'bridge' nodes which link different clusters (in this case teams). So it's not just that people who can't do technical work become glue people, it's often a savvy move in a bureaucracy. Indeed a standard move to increase your power in an organisation is to increase your betweenness-centrality, e.g. managers will actively foster silos because being at the head of a silo means you're a powerful conduit between that silo and everywhere else.

On another note, I've seen in government that there is an exponential growth in not just glue people but glue teams. Here the problem is obvious, the bigger an organisation is, the harder it is to ensure adequate communication between teams working in similar areas because there's so many teams to keep track of. Whenever a communication failure occurs, someone puts their hand-up to make a glue-team, a manager thinks 'this will fix this problem', and thus a new team is born.

Of course, the issue is that the glue-team that might now have resolved the miscommunication problem between teams a and b has now added yet another team to the org chart. The consequent increase in organisational complexity begets more glue-teams elsewhere, you have glue-teams to link to other glue-teams, the solution makes the problem worse, which leads to even more of the solution.

To avoid this run-away explosion in glue-teams I'd suggest two things. Firstly, the fact that cross-team communication is hard means it should be minimised, organisations should be as modular as possible. This is what bureaucracy originally meant, e.g. the delegation of power to Persian satrapies which meant they could act autonomously. Management schools often teach the reverse, thinking that the way to solve communication failure is to make it a strength by maximising the amount of cross-team communication resulting in endless proliferation of glue people and teams. If your organisation requires good information flow from everywhere to everywhere, it's built to fail.

Secondly, glue should be the last resort. How many communication failures are actually because teams don't have well-defined roles and so things slip through the cracks etc.? How many could be fixed by simple process changes (e.g. monthly catch-ups between related teams)? I'm with Schmidt, the less glue the better.

relaxing• 2 years ago

incredibly nice people who sit at interstitial boundaries between groups, and they assist in activity

I don’t understand this at all. “Someone who assists in the interstices” doesn’t sound like anyone I’ve seen or worked with.

Can anyone give examples of what kind of employee/role he’s talking about?

qgin• 2 years ago

As far as I’ve ever seen, the only way truly creative and good work ever gets done is when people who sit at the intersection of many subjects coordinate groups together to work on something. Am I completely misunderstanding what he’s saying?

Contempt for the glue people

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