Top all-time · #1768
Tanya Reilly
Personal blog · noidea.dog/blogcareerprogramming
Tanya Reilly writes No Idea Blog, a personal blog at noidea.dog about career and programming. Since 2018, 42 different Hacker News readers have linked it 48 times, most often “Being Glue”. The last post was in 2022, but the archive is still widely read.
Too few sampled comments (19) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Tanya Reilly's essay "Being Glue" on the invisible glue work that goes unrewarded in promotions and team roles. Other posts cited include a software safety piece and SRECon conference reports.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 19 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Software reliability, leadership for senior engineers, conference speaking and other random tech topics.
Most-linked posts?
- Being Glue26 people · 28 mentions · first linked 2019-05-02
- The history of fire escapes2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2023-05-10
- Maybe Great Idea2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2022-04-01
- Surviving the Organisational Side Quest2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2020-02-10
- /glue2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2025-12-25
What Hacker News says?
Just based on what I've seen and the women I've talked to - a lot of women in tech are encouraged to move into management because (for a variety of societal reasons) they've just upskilled more in EQ than many of their male peers. See also: the pressure to be glue [1] 1: https://noidea.dog/glue
Comment linking /glue
on “Reflections on Being a Female Founder”Submitted Being Glue as a story · 187 points
HN discussionhttps://noidea.dog/glue
Comment linking /glue
on “Bayer is getting rid of bosses and asking staff to ‘self-organize’”Submitted Being Glue as a story · 177 points
HN discussionI'm reading your comment as a form of "feigning surprise", in other words a statement along the lines of "I can't believe target audience doesn't know about x concept". more on the concept: https://noidea.dog/blog/admitting-ignorance
Comment linking /blog/admitting-ignorance
on “More details about the October 4 outage”Submitted Staff Engineer Communities as a story · 162 points
HN discussionHere's another blog post that got popular on HN a few years ago and explains how doing much of what this article advises (not all) will get you nowhere: https://noidea.dog/glue I don't think either are fully right or wrong, but I thought it was interesting to see the difference of opinion.
Comment linking /glue
on “How to do things if you're not that smart and don't have any talent”Submitted Being Glue: Tanya Reilly as a story · 7 points
HN discussionI communicated that badly. It doesn't matter so much how things are seen outside the workplace, but within it. Programming is definitely considered high-status in a software firm: ever heard of the concept of a "rockstar programmer"? Low-status tasks (e.g. vital, but "unpromotable" ones) are delegated to women, and tasks that are associated with femininity are considered low-status. This is a well-documented ( https…
Comment linking /glue
on “Math from Three to Seven”Submitted On doing glue work in a team as a story · 4 points
HN discussionI can't give my boss any work they don't want to do. If I find a problem in another team's domain, I can try to interest them in it, and failing that, I can try to interest my boss in it, but if no one gets interested enough to fix the thing, what am I going to do? Work around the problem and sulk. See Also: Glue Work https://noidea.dog/glue
Comment linking /glue
on “The biggest source of waste is untapped skilled pragmatists”Submitted Being Glue as a story · 2 points
HN discussion> My suggestion is to find gaps that aren't integration efforts, if possible, that are instead extension efforts. Yes! This can go even further and the technical integration work can easily slip into soft/people/team/project/management integration. Here is a talk which warns against doing this kind of glue work too early in your career: Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KClAPipnKqw Summary article: https://noid…
Comment linking /glue
on “John Carmack: Career Advice”Submitted Being Glue as a story · 2 points
HN discussionYour description kind of reminds me of this post -- "Being Glue". https://noidea.dog/glue . It's an important "pseudo" role that doesn't get enough credit, IMO.
Comment linking /glue
on “Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (July 2024)”Submitted Glue Work as a story · 2 points
HN discussion> But I totally agree that academia fails at rewarding people who facilitate the work of others. There is some perversion to this, since the key part of academia is precisely to spread and exchange knowledge. What you’re describing is glue work[1]. Until recently, glue work tended to be invisible and unappreciated across a good majority of the industry. While it’s starting to get visibility, there still isn’t consen…
Comment linking /glue
on “T-Shaped People and Academia”Submitted Being Glue as a story · 2 points
HN discussionThat’s good feedback I think. There’s an article that was going around again about ‘glue work’ ([1]) that has a story where an engineer gets caught up doing all this kind of mentoring, coordination and other work like that and then is passed over for promotions because they don’t have technical achievements (though they claim to have become instrumental in enabling everyone else’s technical achievements). The articl…
Comment linking /glue
on “The Worst Programmer”Submitted Being Glue as a story · 2 points
HN discussionThere’s a very good blog that explains Tim: Being glue. I highly recommend all leadership read it. https://noidea.dog/glue
Comment linking /glue
on “The Worst Programmer”Submitted Surviving the Organisational Side Quest as a story · 2 points
HN discussionMaybe. Let's say there are broadly two hypotheses: A: Women are systematically discriminated against in the workplace (sexism). B: Women are systematically more inclined than men to perceive that they themselves are experiencing sexism. (In the real world, we're going to have some mixture of the two, plus other factors, but simplified models are often useful.) Systematic discrimination by gender in the workplace is…
Comment linking /glue
on “Gender differences in Dutch research funding over time”Submitted Being Glue: The Making of Senior Engineers as a story · 2 points
HN discussionAfter someone gives a talk in person, some of the things they can do online: 1. Mention that they gave a talk 2. Post a video recording online 3. Post the slides online, as-is (PDF or whatever) with no explanation 4. Lay out the slides on a HTML page, with accompanying text (what would have been said by the speaker), so that it's easier to read — while still being clear you're “reading” a talk. 5. Redo/rewrite the w…
Comment linking /impostor
on “Where does my computer get the time from?”Submitted Glue Work as a story · 1 points
HN discussionMost of the comments here are the generic "all business is evil" cynicism that's rampant on HN these days. The reality is not so simple. Here's my perspective, as someone who's actually done annual reviews and tried to build/retain a great team. > drew a straight line between here's what you need to do to get this much of a raise or this much of a bonus This is really really hard to do. It's not a good idea (or even…
Comment linking /glue
on “Ask HN: Why are annual reviews so broken?”Submitted The History of Fire Escapes as a story · 1 points
HN discussionBe careful of "Being Glue" https://www.noidea.dog/glue
Comment linking /glue
on “I Left YouTube”Submitted The history of fire escapes as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
