> 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.
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.