The Glue Work

Every engineering org runs on a category of essential labor that holds teams together and makes everyone else productive, and that the machine handing out promotions and pay cannot see. This series names eight forms of it: the load-bearing engineer the org meets only when they quit, the on-call tax that lands on whoever cares, documentation as an unfunded commons, the fire you prevented that leaves no artifact, the meeting that only works because one unrewarded person runs it. Dry, mechanism-first dispatches from a long-tenured insider on why glue work is rewarded socially and punished careerwise, and what a clear-eyed person actually does about it.