Software Art Thou: Tanya Reilly - Being Glue

The job title is "software engineer", but you seem to live in meetings. You'd like to have time to code, but nobody else is onboarding the junior engineers, updating the roadmap, talking to the users, noticing the things that got dropped, asking questions on design documents, and making sure that everyone's going roughly in the same direction. Without those things, the team won't be as successful.

But now someone's suggesting that you might be happier in a "less technical" role. If this describes you, congratulations: you're the glue! If it's not, have you thought about who is filling this role on your team?

Tanya Reilly, Principal Software Engineer working on Infrastructure at Squarespace, explores this topic in this video. Before Squarespace she spent 12 years in Site Reliability Engineering at Google. Originally from Ireland, she is now an enthusiastic New Yorker.