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.