“Do stuff that seems legibly valuable” becomes the main currency, rather than “do stuff that is actually valuable.”
In my experience, these are aligned quite often, and a good organization/team/manager’s job is keeping them aligned. This involves lots of culture-building, vigilance around goodharting, and recurring check-ins and reevaluations to make sure the layer under you is properly aligned. Some of the most effective things I’ve noticed are rituals like OKR planning and wide-review councils, and having a performance evaluation culture that tries to uphold objective standards.
And of course, the level after this you describe, where people are basically pretending to work, is something effective organizations try to weed out ruthlessly. I’m sure it exists, but competitive pressures are against it persisting for long.
My direct experience is as an increasingly-senior software engineer at Google. It leads me to be much more optimistic about corporations’ abilities to be effective than this article. I truly believe that the things have been set up such that that what gets me and my teammates good ratings or promotions, are actually valuable.
In my experience, these are aligned quite often, and a good organization/team/manager’s job is keeping them aligned. This involves lots of culture-building, vigilance around goodharting, and recurring check-ins and reevaluations to make sure the layer under you is properly aligned. Some of the most effective things I’ve noticed are rituals like OKR planning and wide-review councils, and having a performance evaluation culture that tries to uphold objective standards.
And of course, the level after this you describe, where people are basically pretending to work, is something effective organizations try to weed out ruthlessly. I’m sure it exists, but competitive pressures are against it persisting for long.
My direct experience is as an increasingly-senior software engineer at Google. It leads me to be much more optimistic about corporations’ abilities to be effective than this article. I truly believe that the things have been set up such that that what gets me and my teammates good ratings or promotions, are actually valuable.