Doing nothing at work

    > For instance, I believe that engineers should generally avoid glue work2. Most glue work - making sure people talk to each other, updating docs for work you’re not leading, volunteering to address technical debt - reflects the fact that the organization is not explicitly prioritizing this work. If they were, you wouldn’t need to volunteer for it. Either that’s fine, or it’s a big mistake.

Woah, this some bold advice. In my mind, I don't want to be on the same team as this person... as they are always and only thinking about themselves.

If everyone in the team behaves this way there's no substrate creating opportunities for people like this to capitalize on.

I often fall into this role, and historically have made some quite large impacts because of it. But I take issue with TFA's position of doing nothing being a critical component of being effective and available to attack these problems.

I'm practically never doing nothing when employed. But I'm often looking like nothing is being done through the lens of ticket-oriented accounting. If the author means doing nothing by the metrics, ok, I can agree with them there. But it better be because you're too busy down in the weeds becoming one with the product and grokking details of created messes past and present.

If you're literally doing nothing, you won't be positioned well to understand the implementation details, and you won't be positioned well politically/socially within the org to thrive and be genuinely appreciated by your peers.

This is a complicated precarious path to take if you have any intention of lasting in the org. It's difficult to not accumulate enemies with every win you take at the expense of everyone else being too busy being the substrate you're scavenging. Management and your peers must come to appreciate you're filling a critical void, but the void is implicit and unaccounted for, making this tricky - it's built on trust.

They can see your selective work as exploitation while they take up the slack you create. From their perspective they're overworked because people like you don't do enough to balance the workload.

You need to be recognized as an enabler, the one minding the details, omnipresent - not AWOL doing nothing. Catching the fuckups early, preventing incidents while the green-field chaos monkeys carry on. The win is for the team, and you're effectively being a self-directed janitor cleaning messes nobody knew existed.

The reward for this role, as it really is otherwise somewhat thankless, is the autonomy. It's a management failure when these people get put on a pedestal and promoted more than the people doing the grunt work. That creates animosity within the ranks.

disclaimer: not a manager, not a lead, but often the guy in the corner course-correcting and fixing/preventing horribly broken customer-impacting mistakes. These are just some observations based on decades of startups and in recent years FAANG experience as an SDE.

> you’re just picking up tickets from the backlog, crushing them, then picking up the next one), you’ll miss your chance to do high-impact work in two ways.

> Second, if you perpetually look busy, your manager won’t want to volunteer for you.... "oh, Sean has capacity to help out here, let me tag him in”

That's rather primitive, does the author not realize that you can simply change priorities and just drop the working on the current "low impact keeping me busy ticket"???

Similarly,

> You won’t be chatting with people who are working on other things, or reading team updates, or keeping an eye on ongoing incidents.

That's not doing nothing! Just like writing those team updates isn't doing nothing because it's not a "ticket". I bet literally your job description is not limited to "do tickets"

Ultimately the management should care about what brings in the most revenue. A feature that brings low revenue but has no fire is something no-one cares about. If you have a ton of revenue and no bugs, you likely can get recognition.