The Glue Held
Eric Schmidt told a Stanford class he didn't need the glue people. The receipts on what happened next are public.
On Friday May 15th 2026, Eric Schmidt stood at a podium at the University of Arizona and got booed by graduating students. Multiple times. He had been hired to deliver a commencement address, and the moment he started telling the new graduates that AI was going to touch every profession, every classroom, every hospital, every laboratory - and that their job was to shape it rather than fear it - the booing started. He addressed it directly. I can hear you, he told them.
He kept going.
This is one of several such commencement booings in May. AI evangelism delivered to rooms of people about to enter the workforce is, it turns out, no longer a guaranteed applause line. The room has wised up.
But the booing isn’t the interesting part. The interesting part is that this is a man who has spent the better part of three decades explaining to younger workers why their concerns about their own value don’t matter, and almost nobody objected the first time he said it out loud. To find that quote, you have to go back eleven years.
In 2015, Eric Schmidt walked into a Stanford classroom and said this on camera:
The glue people are incredibly nice people who sit at interstitial boundaries between groups, and they assist in activity. And they are very, very loyal, and people love them, and you don’t need them at all.
He kept going.
At Novell, I kept trying to get rid of these glue people, because they were getting in the way, because they slowed everything down. And every time I get rid of them in one group, they’d show up in another group, and they’d transfer, and get rehired and all that.
He told Larry Page about the problem. Larry said: let’s review every hire. And so they did. Every offer packet at Google was flagged for the scent of glueness - for the trace of someone who might sit between groups and quietly help things along.
Nobody booed. Nobody objected. The lecture is still online. You can watch it.
The work has a name. Tanya Reilly gave it one in 2019, in a talk called Being Glue that has become required reading for anyone trying to explain to their manager why their performance review is going badly. Her observation was structural. The people who do glue work - the unblockers, the translators, the ones who notice that two teams are about to ship incompatible features - get promoted nowhere. The work is illegible to systems built around individual output. The team would collapse without them. The company can’t see them.
Lorin Hochstein pulled at the same thread from the other end. In 2021, he posted Schmidt’s quote on his blog - the same one I just made you read - under the title Contempt for the Glue People, and noted it had been lodged in his brain for years. He didn’t say much about why. He didn’t need to. The quote does its own work, provided you’ve ever worked anywhere that had any.
Both pieces are correct. Both should be read. This is not a contribution to that field; it is one quiet observation about something Schmidt himself admits inside his own monologue, which everybody seems to have noticed and nobody seems to have named.
What I want to talk about is what Schmidt’s anecdote concedes - what he says out loud, on camera, without appearing to hear himself. But I will come back to Schmidt. First, I want to show you the work itself - what it looks like when a room needs a glue person and goes looking for one.
Some years ago, at a company whose name you would recognise, two people from the same team pulled me into a group DM. The message, more or less: we need you, now.
I want to be precise about my standing in that moment, because the standing is the whole point. I was not on call. That, on its own, would be unremarkable. But I was also not on the escalation path that team was meant to follow - not the next name up, not the name after that, not any name on their roster at all. If you had asked the system who should handle what was unfolding, the system would not have returned me. There was no official route by which I belonged in that room.
What was unfolding was this: a group claiming to have breached the company had obtained information it was never meant to hold, and was threatening to release it at the one moment its release would hurt most. The particulars are not mine to set down here, and they do not greatly matter to the story - what matters is the room, and the room believed, to a person, that the threat was real and the damage would be severe. The two who pulled me into that group DM had not reasoned their way to my name. They had panicked their way to it. Somewhere in the scramble, the question they were really asking was: who is the largest available quantity of glue? Whose role touches enough of the company that they could walk into a room on fire and be a stranger to no part of it? That question resolved to me. They did not have the word - Reilly's word, the word this essay is built on - but the instinct was exactly right.
So I went. Not because the org chart sent me. Because the people did.
The room held more senior titles than I had seen in one place before, or since - directors, executives, names I knew from all-hands slides and nowhere else. And it was paralysed. Not quiet; the opposite. Everyone in it had a demand, a requirement, a thing that urgently had to happen. What nobody had was the willingness to own it. Not one of those senior, capable, expensive people would step into the centre and take the thing - each, I suspect, too aware of the price of being wrong in front of the others.
So I asked the most boring question available. Who can give me a rundown of what’s happening?
That is the entire trick, and I want to be honest that it is barely a trick at all. I did not fix the breach. To this day I could not tell you the technical particulars. What I did was sequence the room. What happened first. Where we stand now. Where we need to be. One by one, a director or a head of engineering handed me their piece; one by one, I handed back an instruction the whole room had just heard and agreed to. Every instruction was time-bound. Every group was given a named moment to come back and report. And then I sent them to work.
It took roughly forty-five minutes to pull a room of frightened executives back into something that functioned. By the end everyone was moving - and, the part I am still quietly proud of, everyone was moving on their own version of the plan, the version shaped by where they sat and what they could see. Nobody talked over anybody. Nobody waited to be told. The room had been glued.
It emerged afterwards that none of it had been real. The whole thing had been staged - an exercise, run to see how the company performed under fire. The threat was never real. The paralysis was. The company’s most senior people had frozen, completely, in the face of a danger that had been invented for the occasion - which means the thing I was called in to fix was never the threat. It was the room. The room would have frozen in exactly the same way had the danger been real.
The exercise was reviewed afterwards, written up and held closely, the way these things always are. The staged event got its record. The other event - a room of senior people who could not coordinate themselves until an unrostered process owner walked in and did it for them - got nothing. No review. No document. No note in any system anywhere. Measured by the trace it left behind, the most important thing I did that year may as well never have happened. Almost no one ever knew it had.
Now go back and read the Schmidt quote one more time. I’ll wait.
At Novell, I kept trying to get rid of these glue people, because they were getting in the way, because they slowed everything down. And every time I get rid of them in one group, they’d show up in another group, and they’d transfer, and get rehired and all that.
He thought he was describing rats. He was describing immune response.
The work didn’t vanish when Schmidt fired the people doing it. The work persisted, because the work was load-bearing, and the organisation kept hiring people to do it because the organisation kept needing it done. That is what the sentence says, in plain English, if you strip out the contempt that was filling the speaker’s mouth.
What’s interesting is that the posture isn’t unique to Schmidt. It is a recurring management mode - one that surfaces every decade or so under a different brand and produces a recognisable pattern of downstream consequences. The bills always come due. They just come due late enough that the executives responsible have usually already exited the building.
Google is the most thoroughly documented case, partly because Schmidt himself signed the policy. Every offer packet flagged. Every interstitial-boundary candidate marked for the founders’ inspection. And then, over the following sixteen years, Google produced the most exhaustively chronicled case of organisational coordination failure in the history of consumer software. Ron Amadeo’s 2021 piece in Ars Technica catalogues twenty-three messaging products across that span - Talk, Voice, Wave, Buzz, Allo, Duo, Spaces, Meet, plus messaging features grafted onto Maps, Photos, Pay, Stadia, the Assistant, and the phone app. Amadeo’s diagnosis, after sixteen years of evidence, is bracing: “nobody at the company is really in charge.” The most revealing detail in his piece concerns Google+, where Larry Page tied every employee’s bonus to the product’s success because that was the only way the company could be made to coordinate across teams. Working together was so foreign a concept that it had to be purchased, one employee at a time. The hiring filter had done its job too well.
Twitter ran the same play, compressed. After Elon Musk's acquisition in late 2022, headcount fell from roughly 7,500 to 2,000 in months. Subsequent rounds specifically targeted site reliability engineers - the people whose entire function is to keep systems running when the systems are about to stop running, which is glue work in its purest technical form. An employee, speaking anonymously to NBC News at the time, said they couldn't begin to describe the institutional knowledge being walked out the door - and noted that these were the people previously considered too important to cut. And then, days later, came the moment the universe rarely grants in real time. Musk himself, on his own platform: "I would like to apologise for firing these geniuses." Schmidt admitted in 2015 that the glue people kept getting rehired. Musk admitted in 2022 that he shouldn't have fired them. Two CEOs, saying versions of the same sentence: the work was load-bearing, and we didn't see it until it was gone.
Then everyone saw it. In May 2023, Ron DeSantis chose Twitter Spaces - Musk hosting - to announce his campaign for president. More than half a million people tuned in, and what they got instead was the platform failing in real time: the audio crashed, crashed again, and the event was abandoned and relaunched on a separate account, by which point the audience had roughly halved. Musk, live, could be heard saying the servers were "straining somewhat." His co-host called the meltdown "a good sign." Musk later declared the whole event a victory. A public, audible failure, narrated by the men responsible as a triumph, while it was still happening. And DeSantis was only the most visible instance - outages recurred through 2023, the platform at one point capping how many posts a user could read in a day, and the reporting kept landing on the same cause: the people who knew how the old systems held together were no longer there to hold them. Musk's apology had been glib. The year of outages that followed was the real one.
Boeing is the version of this story where the bills are paid in lives. The 737 MAX crashes of 2018 and 2019 killed 346 people, and the root-cause analyses across multiple Congressional reports, FAA reviews, and academic papers all converge on the same underlying mechanism: a decades-long erosion of the connective work between engineering, safety, and management, beginning with the 1997 merger with McDonnell Douglas and accelerating under CEO Harry Stonecipher, who famously declared his intent to run Boeing “like a business rather than a great engineering firm.” The 2024 FAA independent review identified a disconnect between senior management and the rest of the organisation as a primary contributing factor. That disconnect has a name. It is what happens when the people whose job was to translate between engineering culture and executive decision-making have been told they are slowing things down. The filter is invisible. The crater is not.
The pattern is the same in each case. A management posture treats coordination as parasitic. The people doing it are filtered out, fired, or restructured into irrelevance. The work persists because the work is real - but it persists as undone work, accruing as fragmentation, as outages, as products that should obviously cohere and don’t, and - when the products happen to be aircraft - as funerals. The contempt is the policy. The consequence is the bill. The receipts are public.
Schmidt’s filter was a slow instrument. Every offer packet reviewed by hand, by the founders, one at a time. Artisanal contempt - bespoke, labour-intensive, applied candidate by candidate. It produced the result we have spent this essay examining, but it did not scale especially well.
We have since built something that does.
The layoff rounds of the last few years - the ones announced with a paragraph about focus and discipline and, increasingly, a paragraph about AI - are Schmidt’s filter rebuilt as industrial equipment. The equipment works like this. When a company decides who to cut, it cuts by what it can see: lines of code, tickets closed, revenue attributed to a name, the legible quantum of individual output. It cannot see the work that has no metric - the translation between teams, the institutional memory, the unrecorded message that stopped an outage, the person who walks into a room on fire and is a stranger to no part of it. That work is not on the dashboard. And what is not on the dashboard does not survive contact with a spreadsheet that has been told to find savings.
AI sharpens the blade, because AI is genuinely good at the legible work - the discrete, specified, measurable task. So the story tells itself: this role is automatable, that one redundant, the headcount can come down. But the people swept out are not only the ones whose work AI can do. They are also, disproportionately, the ones whose work was never visible to the system doing the cutting - because illegible work and automatable work get filed under the same heading, and the heading is “cannot account for itself.”
Schmidt reviewed offer packets. We review entire workforces, against dashboards, and call the result efficiency. It is the same filter. We have only made it bigger, faster, and given it a better name.
Which brings us back to a podium in Arizona, and a man being booed.
Schmidt did not say anything especially cruel at that commencement. He told the graduates the future was unwritten and theirs to shape; he told them to get on the rocket ship and not worry about which seat. By the standard of his 2015 remarks about the glue people, it was a gentle speech. They booed him anyway.
It is worth being precise about why, because the booing was not what the coverage made it. It was not a tantrum about technology. Those graduates were not afraid of AI the way you are afraid of a storm. They were afraid of it the way you are afraid of a management decision - because they have spent their entire short adult lives watching what the rocket ship does to the people it decides it can do without. They have watched the layoffs. They have read the paragraph about focus and discipline. They have noticed, even if they cannot yet name it, that the people swept out first are so often the ones who held the place together, and that holding the place together is not a thing the spreadsheet can see.
Schmidt, describing the glue people he could never quite be rid of, thought he was describing rats. He was describing immune response. The booing is the same response, one level up - an organism recognising a pathogen. The graduates are not naive. They are correct. And the function Schmidt spent a career filtering out of his companies turns out to be very hard to filter out of a generation.
He told a Stanford classroom, in 2015, that the glue people were nice and loyal and beloved and that you did not need them at all. He was wrong in the most expensive way it is possible to be wrong: slowly, and with the bill arriving long after he had left the building. You need them. You need them most at the moment the room catches fire and you discover that need and roster were never the same word.
The lecture is still online. You can still watch it. But the rooms have changed, and they are not sitting quietly anymore.