Alison Bain on mentorship, ‘glue work,’ and carving her own path in tech
For years, Alison Bain was determined not to follow in her family’s footsteps. With a software engineer dad and brother, she set her sights on writing, library science, and anything that felt more like her. But a winding path through customer success, a leap into coding bootcamp, and a lot of intentional growth eventually led her back to engineering — this time on her own terms.
Now a Senior Software Engineer at ChimeⓇ, Alison reflects on career pivots, mentorship, “glue work,” and what it really takes to start over.
Avoiding software engineering
I spent years trying not to become a software engineer.
My dad’s a software engineer. My brother’s a software engineer. I was determined to do something different, maybe even something artsy. I could be a writer! Or a reference librarian. I wanted a career that leveraged my strongest skill sets, somewhere I could be wholly myself.
In college, whenever I walked into a Computer Science class it felt like I had wandered into the wrong building. I was almost always the only woman in the room, and even though I loved the coding projects, I kept tanking the hand-written exams. Without any way to test the code, I'd inevitably lose track of a comma somewhere, and there went my grade.
The head of my college's Library Info Tech department asked me once if I was sure I didn't want to switch to Computer Science. “You can program,” he pointed out. “People who can program usually don’t stay in Library Science.”
“Sure,” I said, “it’s fun, but I’m not good at it. I'm not even good at math. I'm not going to be a software engineer."
So I didn’t. For a while, I worked in academic tutoring, and then I moved into customer success at a legacy SaaS company serving librarians. That didn’t count as software engineering, because even though I worked at a software company I wasn’t the one writing code.
Except sometimes I did write code. Just a little! I fixed small bugs. I made accessibility tweaks to the front end. I ran internal coding bootcamps teaching coworkers how to customize pages. It was fun, and challenging, and I wanted the librarians to be happy.
Eventually, the rest of my job started feeling smaller in comparison. I was good at it, but I wasn't growing.
So I asked if I could spend a little more time coding. My company politely reminded me I was not a software engineer. I asked if I could occasionally work with the software engineers. My company told me the engineers were very busy. Finally, I asked if I could become a trainee software engineer. Not even a real one! I could be like an intern.
My company offered to make me a manager instead.
So I quit.
The bootcamp journey
I enrolled in a full-stack women’s coding bootcamp, where the exams weren’t handwritten and I was never the only woman in the room. Coding was still difficult, and I wasn't acing every assignment. I kept waiting for someone to tell me I'd made an embarrassing mistake and should go back to my old life.
Instead, I was matched with my mentor, Eliza, who believed immediately and unwaveringly that I could be a great engineer. Five years later, we still meet every week. (Hi, Eliza!)
When I tanked my first few technical interviews, Eliza helped me drill until I was more confident. When a company offered me a QA support role instead of the software engineering job I’d applied for, she warned me not to take it.
“But I’d probably be really good at it,” I said.“A QA support role would be a perfectly fine job,” she said, “if that’s what you wanted to do. But you just went to so much effort to become a software engineer. You owe it to yourself to find somewhere you can actually be an engineer.”
Now that I’d finally admitted I wanted to be a software engineer, everyone kept offering me non-technical roles instead.
The trap of glue work
Shortly after I was hired as an engineer, I was offered a temporary leadership coverage position. It was flattering. Leadership thought I'd be great at it.
“But that’s still not engineering,” Eliza said. “That’s glue work.”Glue work, a term coined by Tanya Reilly, refers to all the labor that holds an engineering team together but isn’t engineering: coordination, documentation, process design, training, leadership coverage. I love glue work. I was already great at glue work.
That's the trap.
Women in tech — especially women who come from non-technical careers — are asked to do glue work far more often, especially at the junior level. If you’re doing glue work instead of technical work, you don’t grow as an engineer. If you only do glue work, you eventually get nudged out of technical roles.
I turned the coverage position down. I'd just up-ended my life to become an engineer. I wanted to build things, even if I wasn't already good at it.
What’s working
Starting over in a new career when you were good at your last job is hard. I was reminded, over and over, to ask for help, even when asking for help felt unnatural. I'd run international trainings for university deans at my last job, and now I needed help with git merges. All of my learning happened in public, on Slack.
I’d spent so much of my life trying to be great at the things I was already good at. It was hard to show up every day just to be bad at something.
In college, I took a creative writing class where we wrote weekly responses to the assigned reading. Every week, I'd tear apart everything I thought didn't work in the text, and every week I'd get an A. One week, the professor wrote me a full page of feedback.
I'd mastered hitting the rubric, they said. I could keep doing what I was doing and ace their class, but they thought I could do better. I was focused on the negative, and the negative was easy. They challenged me to focus on the positive, instead: what was working? That's harder.
I was good at customer success. I was good at glue work. I was good at hitting the rubric. The engineers around me had been programming since they were in diapers.
In my first performance review I was pretty sure I was going to be fired, because I'd been so much better at my last job.Instead, I got promoted. My manager and team could see what was working, even when I couldn’t.
Learning while doing
After four years as a software engineer at Chime, I don’t feel like I’m pretending anymore. I’m a good engineer. I can write solid code and complete projects that would have terrified me when I started. More than that, I'm confident in my capacity to do things I wasn't good at a year ago, or even a week ago.
Last month, I was promoted to Senior Software Engineer. There’s an entire world of new skills and responsibilities to grow into, and like anything else, I’ll learn to do the work by doing the work.
I love engineering. It's still the best puzzle. I still love creative writing, tutoring, and library science, too. Those parts of me didn’t disappear when I switched careers – they just mean I make great slide decks when I need to.I spent years trying not to be a software engineer. I'm glad I let myself become one anyway.