Contempt serves to self-elevate by denigrating. It is a classic power-over kind of move, for it takes personal power from.

Still. The importance of “glue people” might be better understood if we used a word that connotes cohesion rather than adhesion??

@RuthMalan We're not "used gum people on the underside of a pub table"

We're the compensatory mechanics to failures in planning, communication, teamwork, collaboration, and shared understanding.

We are the antithesis to "move fast and break things". Probably where this disdain comes from

With the help of glue people, fewer things get broken, the things that get broken are less broken, and more things that make it out the door work as intended.

@microwavenby @RuthMalan the towering lack of understanding by Schmidt of why people who cross boundaries are not just useful but essential … it really boggles the mind. It’s like he has no understanding of complex systems behavior at all.

Multi-disciplinary people who can straddle domains are perhaps the *most* essential part of any org bigger than a handful of folks.

@darkuncle @microwavenby @RuthMalan A glue persons job is to hide information from doing the work, a glue person will say they hide what the people doing the work that will distract them, politics etc. However, "glue" people aren't actually contributing to the work directly, so the ability to know what the team needs to know is always going to be limited, because they don't have the skillset to know.

For every named role you create you don't change the work that needs to be done, you just move the tasks around, and by moving the relationships to a single person, so deprive everyone else in the team from building those relationships, and you need those relationships to write code well.

@PurpleBooth @microwavenby @RuthMalan I'd argue that's the exact opposite of the value of a glue person: they aren't hiding information, they are connecting domains and teams that might typically not connect often or work together, and highlighting how work that happens in one area can impact or improve another.

Perhaps we aren't talking about the same kind of people? David Epstein's book "Range” on the power of generalists overlaps a lot with the mental model I have for glue people, and the great ones I have worked with in my career.