How to gain influence as a junior engineer
It's not the common internet advice
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The advice on the internet is to focus on your technical skills as a junior engineer.
Leave the meetings to the senior dudes. The only promotable work is the hard skills.
That’s true.
But how do you find the opportunities to make an impact? Do you just wait?
You need both technical skills and influence
For technical skills, it’s clear: Do more code and designs. Read the technical books.
But what if the only work given to you is moving configs around?
And what about gaining influence?
I’m onboarding in a new team and I’m mentoring an engineer who joined out of university a couple of months ago.
What am I doing and recommending to this engineer? Use “glue work” in your favor.
In her famous talk about glue work, Tanya Reilly talks about glue work hurting junior engineers.
Yet, I’m recommending it and doing it myself.
I’m talking about glue work as a proxy for influence.
And influence as the keystone to get opportunities.
In this post, you’ll learn
How I stole an opportunity from my Senior engineer’s hands.
What I’m doing and I recommend as a mentor.
The tweak to make glue work useful for your career.
How to leave a trail of evidence of your glue work.
Why glue work has a bad rep
Being the nice guy or gal won’t get you promoted.
People promote the engineers who played a key technical role in projects with big impact.
Your glue work doesn’t move the project forward. Only the technical design and code do.
Everyone tells you you need a key technical contribution.
But you are a junior, you are not playing this role yet.
Uhh, we are in a deadlock situation.
With low-complexity tasks, you are making some progress.
But it could be better.
Glue work and technical skills are not exclusive. Don’t go all or nothing into it.
You get good at what you practice.
You need to find a way to practice on the good opportunities
Why am I recommending it
Good and bad glue work.
I’m not talking about sacrificing your priorities to help others all the time
I’m talking about leading and raising the bar in your team. Having an eye on things going on. Not waiting for someone else to tell you what to do.
Let’s see some examples:
Bad glue work for software engineers:
Scheduling all team events.
Reserving all meeting rooms in the office for all the meetings.
Reminding people of their action items.
All these should be a shared burden between team members.
To ease the burden, look for automation opportunities.
Good glue work for software engineers:
Maintaining proper documentation.
Insisting on Operational Excellence standards.
Providing inputs to managers and product managers.
Tracking the progress of projects and calling out when there’s a risk.
Being the Point of Contact to talk with dependencies.
All these are giving you the big picture of the projects. When anyone needs input, you are the first person they’ll think about.
You become the “go-to” person.