---
id: ins_glue-work-is-staff-leadership
operator: Tanya Reilly
operator_role: Principal Engineer, Squarespace; author "The Staff Engineer's Path"
source_url: https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/the-staff-engineers/9781098118723/
source_type: book
source_title: The Staff Engineer's Path
source_date: 2022-09-30
captured_date: 2026-05-01
domain: [engineering, leadership]
lifecycle: [process-cadence, hiring-team-design]
maturity: foundational
artifact_class: framework
score: { originality: 4, specificity: 4, evidence: 4, transferability: 5, source: 5 }
tier: A
related: [ins_principal-ic-is-force-multiplier, ins_staff-archetypes-rotate-by-design, ins_all-problems-become-people-problems]
raw_ref: raw/essays/multi-operator--marketer-rotation-pmm-builder-takes--2026-05.md
---

# Glue work is technical leadership, not a tax on the IC

## Claim
The unglamorous, often unrecognized work that holds teams together, design reviews, mentorship, escalation routing, ambiguity reduction, cross-team translation, is not a distraction from the real engineering job. It is the technical leadership.

## Mechanism
At staff/principal scope, the bottleneck is rarely missing code; it's missing alignment, missing context, missing escalation paths. Glue work resolves those bottlenecks. When orgs label glue as a tax (something you tolerate to do real work), they push staff engineers back into IC mode and the systemic problems persist. When orgs name glue as the leadership surface and review on it, the bottleneck moves and the team accelerates.

## Conditions
Holds when:
- The org's career ladder explicitly values cross-team work and mentorship.
- Glue is performed by senior people with judgment, not dumped on junior contributors as scut work.

Fails when:
- Glue is uncompensated and unrecognized, it then becomes a career trap, especially for women and minoritised groups (Reilly's earlier "Being Glue" talk addresses this).
- The IC has no scope to refuse glue or shape it, it becomes Swiss cheese on the calendar with no shipped artifacts (Charity Majors's warning).

## Evidence
> "Glue work — the unglamorous, often unrecognized work that holds teams together — is an invaluable form of technical leadership."

· Tanya Reilly, *The Staff Engineer's Path*, O'Reilly 2022

Companion warning from Reilly's 2019 SREcon "Being Glue" talk: glue work without recognition disproportionately falls on women and gets labelled as "not technical enough" at promotion time.

## Signals
- Staff engineers ship written artifacts (RFCs, post-mortems, technical strategy docs) as their primary output, not commits.
- Promotion packets cite cross-team impact and mentorship by name.
- Junior engineers point to specific staff/principal people as the reason their work shipped.

## Counter-evidence
Charity Majors warns glue work uncapped turns the staff IC's calendar into Swiss cheese. The Reilly framing only protects against career trap when the org has explicit competency definitions for staff+ that name glue. In orgs that lack that, glue remains a ladder hazard.

## Cross-references
- `ins_principal-ic-is-force-multiplier`, Silvia Botros's adjacent framing of the role.
- `ins_staff-archetypes-rotate-by-design`, Will Larson's archetype map; Solver and Right Hand are explicitly glue-shaped.
- `ins_all-problems-become-people-problems`, Botros on why people work is the work.