162: Glue Work with Denise Yu

December 25th, 2019 · 1 hr 1 min

About this Episode

00:58 - Denise’s Superpower: She is a classically trained musician and is good at transcribing music in her head.

03:30 - Glue Work

  • Tanya Reilly
  • Doing Tasks That Are Adjacent to Coding
  • Scheduling
  • Making Sure Meetings Have Agendas
  • Who Tends to do Glue Work
  • Emotional Labor

13:07 - What Denise Has Done to Improve the Glue Work Situation

  • Having the Terminology Helps A Lot

17:31 - How to Address Changing the Structure of Glue Work

  • Thinking Globally and Acting Locally
  • Burnout
  • Writing More Feedback Than Managers Expect
  • Writing Feedback About Glue Work
  • Virginia Satir

31:40 - Offboarding Yourself

37:10 - Release Engineering

39:45 - Being a Product Manager

46:39 - Being Back in the Development Role

  • Working With Teams

Reflections:

John: The distinction between glue work that is just work that you are doing and glue work that you are enjoying and getting satisfaction out of. See what he can do to add glue work tasks into evaluations and part of everyone’s job.

Rein: Burnout isn’t just working long hours. Burnout becomes a real danger when those things combine with acute alienation.

Jacob: If product managers tried to be more transparent with their day to day tasks, and trying to listen more himself to what the PMs are saying.

Denise: Thinking globally but solving locally. Always be offboarding yourself.

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