Yes exactly. With transparency and predefined incentives, you can now make informed rational decisions about what company you want to work for based on how you feel their values (and yes, what you're describing are essentially values) align with your own and with where you feel you'll be successful.

If you think about this over a long enough timescale, and believe in something like the efficient market hypothesis, companies will converge on near-optimal structures that pay for the performance that is valued in their niche, and individual will be able to make informed decisions to work with companies that will pay them based on their strengths.

Note that I'm not saying that a company can't ever change its compensation and performance evaluation, so if LoC is a bad metric, over time I'd expect companies to move away from it as they find it to be gamed. But like, I'm not going to stop a company from picking a bad metric, or claim that transparency is bad because companies can make bad decisions. Companies can make equally bad decisions today, and you won't know.

You are making the assumption that an easily written set of fixed rules will outperform the more fluid and less easily quantified but nonetheless real heuristic of “anticipate what leadership needs”.

I’d be very surprised if the game like companies you describe can outperform a well led organization.

Addressing the other thread first:

> What if the better criteria for picking a good place to work is good leadership, and not a rule set?

I think an attribute of good leadership is being able to clearly communicate goals and priorities. If you can clearly communicate those goals and priorities in advance, you can evaluate people based on how well they perform against those goals and priorities.

If I'm forced to "anticipate what leadership needs", without any guidance on how or what leadership values, I'm doing the same job as "leadership", in that I'm defining organizational values, goals, and priorities. That's bad, because it dilutes leadership.

> You are making the assumption that an easily written set of fixed rules will outperform the more fluid and less easily quantified but nonetheless real heuristic of “anticipate what leadership needs”.

> I’d be very surprised if the game like companies you describe can outperform a well led organization.

I don't think I am. I don't think such heuristics are particularly easy to quantify or easy to write down, nor do I think they're particularly fixed. I do however think that most successful organizations do something like what I'm doing. As far as I know, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Facebook all provide more concrete performance expectations than "anticipate leadership needs". It would be hard to describe all of those as not "well led" or underperforming. In fact, most modern companies with more than a few hundred engineers develop some form of leveling system and rubric.

The challenges with these are that they often remain vague, since they need to apply reasonably well to every new-grad engineer working at the company, from someone working on client features in javascript, to someone optimizing the C++ compiler, to everything in between. But even still, you can usually get better, pre-registered answers from your manager or director that are more relevant and local: "If you complete this project on time, that should prove performance at rating X or at level +". How exactly this works depends a bit on the company (e.x. at Google, since peer reviews are important, having a senior peer or two whoa aren't your manager clearly state that something is L+1 work is probably more valuable than your manager stating it, and good managers communicate that).

This of course doesn't mean that you have no autonomy. Goals can be vague and high level. "Ship Frobulators by the end of the year" is a goal, and "we value end-user experience over implementation cost" is a value. If you know your company (or perhaps at a large company, your organization) has those goals and values, and you know the method by which they convert achievement of goals and values into compensation, you can better do what they want.

The alternatives are that:

1. Leadership is unable to express their goals and values in a way that clearly communicate what they want from employees. This appears to be what you're getting at with the example of LoC.

2. Leadership is unable to maintain consistent goals and values

3. Leadership doesn't want to reward people based on their stated goals and values

etc. etc. etc.

In the first case, they're incompetent. In the second case, they're unreliable. In the third, they're duplicitous and trying to compensate you based on some secret, second set of values, as opposed to the ones that they're claiming to share. None of those alternative are things that inspire confidence in leadership.

I think you are missing some possibilities:

> 1. Leadership is unable to express their goals and values in a way that clearly communicate what they want from employees. This appears to be what you're getting at with the example of LoC.

An alternative you haven’t considered is that leadership is excellent at communicating what they want, but it’s not reducible to a simple set of incentive foals.

2. Leadership is unable to maintain consistent goals and values

Another alternative that you are not considering is that the world is dynamic and excellent leadership involves adapting goals as the world changes, not maintaining consistency for the sake of easy comparison with other organizations.

3. Leadership doesn't want to reward people based on their stated goals and values

This is a non-sequitur if we consider 1 & 2.

None of this implies duplicity or secrets.

Perhaps people can judge leaders based on results and culture without needing to see it reduced to a rule set.

> An alternative you haven’t considered is that leadership is excellent at communicating what they want, but it’s not reducible to a simple set of incentive foals.

Can you give an example?

> Another alternative that you are not considering is that the world is dynamic and excellent leadership involves adapting goals as the world changes, not maintaining consistency for the sake of easy comparison with other organizations.

I did consider this. I don't think maintaining consistency for the sake of easy comparison is a good reason to maintain consistency, but consistency in values is good because it changing values is damaging to an organization. It requires a cultural shift that usually causes deep pain and often requires firing members of leadership (I suggest reading https://apenwarr.ca/log/20190926 for a good post that influences my thoughts here and matches my experience).

If leadership is unable to maintain consistent values, that is a failure of leadership in my eyes. They are unreliable. Values can change, but they should do so slowly and rarely (and with good, and preferably transparent, reason).

If a leader is unable to maintain cohesive goals over a reasonable timescale, that's also an indictment of their abilities to plan within and understand the space they are working in.

Or to put another way, your organization will not develop a cohesive identity and culture without clear goals and values. Now oftentimes, you do have some clear values even if you don't state them, but then the question for leadership becomes "are those really the values you want"? And if you don't know them well enough to be able to state them, I'd suggest that the answer is probably not.

> Perhaps people can judge leaders based on results and culture

I'll reiterate: you cannot judge a leader based on culture if they don't declare what that culture is, or if their values and goals change too often. Values and goals set culture, and if values and goals change, culture changes. If all you know about a leader is that their values and goals change often, you can't judge them and their organization by how it looks today, because you can have high confidence that it will look fundamentally different soon. That's a sign of dysfunction. So I do judge them based on that: I judge them to be bad leaders. You appear to disagree, but I'm not sure how you are judging them if you can't even be sure of what their values will be tomorrow.

Leaders maintaining values is a matter of whether they have integrity, not of whether they can write down a set of rules for determining employee pay grades.

I don’t really know why you trust organizations that can write a statement of values down not to change.

Frequently these statements are written by consultants anyway, and organizations that do have good written principles that they live up to, do so because they have leaders of integrity, not the other way around.

I accept that you can’t see any other way to judge leaders than by examining their written statements.

> I don’t really know why you trust organizations that can write a statement of values down not to change.

I don't! But I do trust that it will be moderately more difficult (and far more transparent) for them to do so than an organization which chooses not to. If you have your values declared, people can hold you (or the org) accountable to them. If you then change them, you have to announce it, or people will continue to hold you accountable to the old one.

> and organizations that do have good written principles that they live up to, do so because they have leaders of integrity, not the other way around.

I agree! But good leaders also make it easy for their reports to hold them accountable, and it's far more difficult to hold someone accountable to a set of values if those values are unstated. That's why the values need to be stated. Like, please explain to me how you live up to the organizations principles if no one knows what they are! (and if everyone agrees on what they are, why can't you write them down?)

And I should clarify if it wasn't already clear, I'm not talking about values like "integrity" or "respect the user", but things like "bias toward action" and "move fast and break things", that give you insight into how decisions should be made in the org.

> I accept that you can’t see any other way to judge leaders than by examining their written statements.

I judge leaders by examining how their stated values correspond with their actions. Their stated values give me a framework for judging them.

> I'm not talking about values like "integrity" or "respect the user", but things like "bias toward action" and "move fast and break things", that give you insight into how decisions should be made in the org.

How do are these qualitatively different kinds of value?

>> I accept that you can’t see any other way to judge leaders than by examining their written statements.

> I judge leaders by examining how their stated values correspond with their actions. Their stated values give me a framework for judging them.

An alternative is to simply judge their actions, how they treat people, and the results their organization produces by your own values.

> How do are these qualitatively different kinds of value?

The second set are tradeoffs, they give you a framework for decision making: "integrity" is obviously a thing you want, but everyone wants it, it doesn't really tell you anything about the values that a particular organization has in comparison to another. The second set are implicitly about tradeoffs: when on the fence, prefer doing something to not doing something, or when you're uncertain, make a change and deploy a feature even at the cost of potentially breaking things. This gives you information on how decision should be made and what the organization values (features > reliability, at the margin). When that value changes ("move fast with stable infra") it tells you that while the organization still values velocity over reliability in some places, when dealing with core infrastructure, you should work the other way, preferring stability over feature velocity.

This is explained better in the blog post I linked, I'm mostly restating what it says, but worse.

> An alternative is to simply judge their actions, how they treat people, and the results their organization produces by your own values.

But, and here's an important thing: a leaders' values may be different in different circumstances! The same person, when running a 5 person startup, and a 50,000 person company, will land on different sides of the same tradeoffs! Organizational priorities change. The values I'm describing are how you communicate those organizational priorities.

If you just try to judge a leader or organization based on how they acted in the past, you will be misled if circumstances have changed, unless you can read the leaders mind. That's why stating values is important. Again: they're how you communicate priorities.

How the leader acts and how they treat people don't fundamentally matter when you're trying to figure out if the work you're doing will be considered valuable by the organization. Like yes, you should work for leadership who you enjoy working for on a personal level. But that's totally independent from how good a leader they are. There are very nice people who are incompetent leaders, and there are people I consider assholes and wouldn't want to work for who do a good job of managing their organizations.

It seems like you're talking about personal values (and ethics) which are important yes, but not at all what I was talking about. I'm talking about organizational values as an aspect of leadership. These are in many ways totally distinct from the personal ethics you hold.

And importantly, I think with very few exceptions, trying to glean anything about organizational ethics from stated values is a fool's errand. But they are still important for stating organizational priorities. Don't confuse the two!

> If you just try to judge a leader or organization based on how they acted in the past, you will be misled if circumstances have changed, unless you can read the leaders mind.

Only if you don’t take into account the changed circumstances. And if you’re going to ignore circumstances, clearly no set of written priorities will save you.

How someone actually makes decisions is obviously more discernible from the decisions they have made in practice than from a set of statements they make about how they do it.

> But, and here's an important thing: a leaders' values may be different in different circumstances! The same person, when running a 5 person startup, and a 50,000 person company, will land on different sides of the same tradeoffs! Organizational priorities change.

This is a point I explained to you earlier. I’m glad you now agree with it.

> Only if you don’t take into account the changed circumstances.

How can you take those circumstances into account without knowing what leadership values in those circumstances? And anyway, how do you even know you have full information? Like, the point of leadership, in a very generic sense, is to distill the context that I don't need to worry about down into instructions at an appropriate level for me to act on. If they aren't doing that, then what are they doing?

> This is a point I explained to you earlier.

You may have attempted to communicate this. You did not succeed, as I still don't know where or when you tried to make this point.

> If you just try to judge a leader or organization based on how they acted in the past, you will be misled

You might be. But I don’t really see how you know that about anyone but yourself.

How someone actually makes decisions is obviously more discernible from the decisions they have made in practice than from a set of statements they make about how they do it.