Comment by robertclaus

I lead a team of engineers at a company that lacks many glue people at the moment due to rapid growth. My experience is that when you don't have these people it means everyone else needs to fill the gap for Cross-Team communication. (Or develop silos) That's a huge time sink beyond a certain scale - developers stuck in meetings all the time instead of getting their work done. I think managers like glue people because they see them as work multipliers by freeing up the rest of the team.

Obviously the ideal answer is to have teams do better work and documentation to reduce the need for cross team communication, so I can see where a "no glue people stance" could come from, but at most mid size companies I think its at odds with the business velocity demands.