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First, I don't get why diversity is given passing mention when there's nothing related specific to diversity or gender politics in the solid idea discussed by t

First, I don't get why diversity is given passing mention when there's nothing related specific to diversity or gender politics in the solid idea discussed by the article. I also tend to value this sort of work and I aspire to be this sort of person, but it's easy to see how a company would end up incentivizing their engineers to create more stuff. Creating stuff gives glue types their chance to optimize the small stuff. Meanwhile, it's genuinely harder to find someone who can rise to the occasion of high technical output after doing a good glue job, than it is someone who does great technical work and can also be this sort of glue person. Someone who does a lot of high impact technical work can identify bottlenecks and could very well do the same work as the glue person. The opposite isn't always true. It's also much harder to figure out if someone is just very nice and doing work that would be picked up by someone else in their absence or if they are indeed identifying pain points no one else could.

BossingAround 6y ago
> First, I don't get why diversity is given passing mention when there's nothing related specific to diversity or gender politics in the solid idea discussed by the article. If you can get promoted for many things in multiple ways, that means diverse promotion system, which means you'll get more diverse seniors and more diverse leadership. If your goal is to have a wide range of skilled people from various backgrounds in senior places, relaxing rules around promotions is definitely a way to get closer to that goal. If you have a strict promotion criteria, you might end up promoting very similar people. An extreme example: Only people from Ivy League schools can get to senior and above. Consequence: you'll end up with very heterogeneous leadership 5-10 years of such a policy (most likely even leadership that formed friendships while in university).
DominikD 6y ago
> First, I don't get why diversity is given passing mention when there's nothing related specific to diversity or gender politics in the solid idea discussed by the article. It links to the paper describing how non-promotable work is divided between genders in a mixed setting. This is clearly a diversity problem. If women take the bulk of work that won't get them promoted, you end up with women underrepresented in senior positions. Did you read the article?
red_admiral 6y ago
In my reading of the article, the diversity point is that in a mixed-gender team, women are much more likely to be the ones finding themselves in glue roles, and this could be one of many components in the problem of why so many women leave tech (the "leaky pipeline"). The article's argument, as I read it, is that Glue Person is as good a coder as the next person when she has a whole block of time free in her calendar, but the problem is that her calendar is full of meetings. One thing I like about this post is that it presents an actionable way to do something to improve diversity: managers should check if the women in your team are disproportionately loaded with the kind of task that's essential for the project to succeed, but doesn't count as much for promotion metrics.

BossingAround 6y ago

> First, I don't get why diversity is given passing mention when there's nothing related specific to diversity or gender politics in the solid idea discussed by the article. If you can get promoted for many things in multiple ways, that means diverse promotion system, which means you'll get more diverse seniors and more diverse leadership. If your goal is to have a wide range of skilled people from various backgrounds in senior places, relaxing rules around promotions is definitely a way to get closer to that goal. If you have a strict promotion criteria, you might end up promoting very similar people. An extreme example: Only people from Ivy League schools can get to senior and above. Consequence: you'll end up with very heterogeneous leadership 5-10 years of such a policy (most likely even leadership that formed friendships while in university).

DominikD 6y ago

> First, I don't get why diversity is given passing mention when there's nothing related specific to diversity or gender politics in the solid idea discussed by the article. It links to the paper describing how non-promotable work is divided between genders in a mixed setting. This is clearly a diversity problem. If women take the bulk of work that won't get them promoted, you end up with women underrepresented in senior positions. Did you read the article?

red_admiral 6y ago

In my reading of the article, the diversity point is that in a mixed-gender team, women are much more likely to be the ones finding themselves in glue roles, and this could be one of many components in the problem of why so many women leave tech (the "leaky pipeline"). The article's argument, as I read it, is that Glue Person is as good a coder as the next person when she has a whole block of time free in her calendar, but the problem is that her calendar is full of meetings. One thing I like about this post is that it presents an actionable way to do something to improve diversity: managers should check if the women in your team are disproportionately loaded with the kind of task that's essential for the project to succeed, but doesn't count as much for promotion metrics.