Monday morning, October 6th. Watching a brilliant engineer spend their weekend building a demo to show in Monday's standup instead of fixing the architectural issue that would save the team months of pain later, and realizing we've trained people to optimize for visibility rather than value.

The Visibility Premium

Here's what happens in every organization: work that's easy to see gets rewarded. Work that's hard to see gets ignored. This seems obvious until you realize it means we systematically under-reward the most important work while over-rewarding theater.

The engineer who closes 50 tickets looks productive. The engineer who refactors the codebase so future work is 10x easier looks like they did nothing—no tickets closed, no features shipped, just some vague claims about "improving architecture."

The manager who runs impressive meetings with slides and metrics appears competent. The manager who quietly unblocks their team, prevents conflicts, and makes everyone more effective has nothing to show for it—no artifacts, no presentations, just a team that somehow works better than others.

The academic who publishes 20 mediocre papers advances their career. The academic who spends years developing a genuinely novel framework that challenges disciplinary assumptions produces nothing legible to the tenure committee—too ambitious to finish quickly, too different to fit existing categories, too risky to bet a career on.

In every case, the system rewards legible work over valuable work. And because humans are responsive to incentives, we gradually learn to produce legibility rather than value.

What Legibility Selects For

Legible work has specific properties: it's measurable, it's visible, it's legible to the people who control resources. These properties make work rewardable, but they have nothing to do with making work valuable.

The best work is often illegible precisely because it's complex, contextual, and long-term. You can't put "prevented the team from building the wrong thing" on a performance review. You can't quantify "created an environment where people felt safe taking risks." You can't display "understood the real problem beneath the stated problem" on a dashboard.

But you can put "delivered three features ahead of schedule" on a review. You can quantify "100% on-time project delivery." You can display "processed 200 support tickets" on a dashboard.

So the system selects for people who are good at generating legible metrics. Not people who are good at the actual work. Not people who solve hard problems or create real value. People who produce artifacts that show up in the systems that distribute rewards.

Over time, this doesn't just reward the wrong work—it eliminates the right work. The person who focuses on valuable but illegible work gets passed over for promotion. They learn to spend their time on legible metrics instead. The valuable work stops happening, but nobody notices because it was never visible in the first place.

The Dashboard Delusion

We tell ourselves that metrics help us manage complexity. If we can measure something, we can optimize it. If we can put it on a dashboard, we can track progress. This is true as far as it goes—which isn't very far.

The problem is that dashboards create an illusion of comprehensiveness. What's on the dashboard becomes "what matters." What's not on the dashboard becomes invisible, and then gradually becomes unimportant, and finally stops existing at all.

A customer support team gets measured on ticket closure time. Seems reasonable—we want fast support. But "ticket closure time" measures how quickly tickets get closed, not how thoroughly problems get solved. The agents who actually solve root causes take longer per ticket and look worse on the dashboard. The agents who close tickets quickly without solving problems look great.

Predictably, the system rewards the quick closers. They get promoted. They train new hires. Over time, the entire team optimizes for ticket velocity, and customer problems stop getting solved. But the dashboard shows continuous improvement: ticket closure time keeps declining. By the time anyone notices that customer satisfaction is collapsing, the connection between "optimizing for the dashboard" and "destroying actual value" is too distant to be obvious.

The dashboard didn't measure the wrong thing accidentally. It measured what was easy to measure, which is almost never what matters most. And once you measure something, you incentivize it. And once you incentivize it, it becomes the thing people do, whether or not it was ever valuable.

The Credit Paradox

The most valuable work often gets the least credit because value and credit flow through different channels.

Credit flows to whoever can claim responsibility for a visible success. Value flows from whoever actually made the success possible, visible or not.

The product manager gets credit for the successful launch. They gave the presentation, they coordinated the teams, they're the visible owner. But the launch succeeded because an engineer spent three months earlier building infrastructure that made the whole thing possible, a designer ran user research that identified the actual problem, and a support person knew exactly which features customers actually needed.

None of those people get credit. They weren't visible at the crucial moment. Their work was input, context, enabling condition—not the legible achievement that the system knows how to reward.

This isn't because the product manager is taking credit dishonestly. It's because the system only has mechanisms to reward legible achievement, and "gave the presentation" is legible while "created the conditions for success" is not.

Over time, smart ambitious people learn to position themselves where credit flows, not where value gets created. They learn to take visible roles on projects that are already likely to succeed. They learn to avoid valuable but risky foundational work in favor of legible last-mile execution.

The result is organizations full of people competing to be near the finish line while nobody wants to do the difficult early work that makes finishing possible. The valuable work either doesn't happen, or it gets done by people who haven't yet learned to optimize for legibility instead of impact.

The Goodhart's Law Cascade

Once you measure something as a proxy for value, people optimize for the measure, and the measure stops tracking value. This is Goodhart's Law, and it's everywhere.

"Lines of code" becomes the measure of programmer productivity. Programmers write more lines of code. Code quality collapses. Bugs multiply. The codebase becomes unmaintainable. But the dashboard shows increasing productivity: lines of code are way up.

"Publications" becomes the measure of academic contribution. Academics publish more papers. Each paper says less. The literature becomes cluttered with incremental results. Real innovation declines because it's too risky and slow to compete with rapid publication of safe results. But the dashboard shows increasing output: publications are way up.

"Active users" becomes the measure of app success. Designers add notifications, badges, streaks—anything to keep users opening the app. The app becomes more annoying and less useful. Users keep opening it (to dismiss notifications) but like it less. But the dashboard shows success: active users are way up.

In every case, optimizing for the measure destroys the value it was meant to track. And because the measure is legible and the value is not, nobody notices until it's too late. The dashboard says everything is great right up until the system collapses.

The Illegibility Advantage

Here's the contrarian insight: the most valuable work is systematically illegible because it's complex, contextual, and long-term. Which means if you want to create real value, you have to be willing to do illegible work.

The engineer who fixes the underlying architectural problem won't get credit this quarter. They might not get credit at all. But six months later, the team will ship faster, have fewer bugs, and spend less time on maintenance. That's real value, created by someone willing to work on what matters rather than what shows up on dashboards.

The teacher who focuses on helping struggling students develop confidence and curiosity won't show impressive test score gains. But ten years later, those students will be more likely to pursue learning, take intellectual risks, and develop real expertise. That's real value, created by someone willing to optimize for long-term outcomes rather than short-term metrics.

The founder who turns down growth opportunities to build a strong culture and sustainable business won't show hockey-stick revenue curves. But they'll build a company that lasts, treats people well, and creates value for everyone involved rather than extracting it for investors. That's real value, created by someone willing to prioritize what matters over what's fundable.

In every case, creating real value requires accepting illegibility. You can't prove you're doing the right thing. You can't show it on a dashboard. You have to do it because it's important, and trust that the value will eventually become obvious—or accept that it might not, and do it anyway.

The October 6th Question

Today, ask yourself: am I optimizing for what matters, or for what's legible?

When you decide how to spend your time, are you choosing work that creates value or work that generates visible metrics? When you evaluate others, are you judging their actual contribution or just what shows up in the systems you use to distribute rewards?

And if you notice that you're optimizing for legibility—that you're doing work because it looks good rather than because it matters—ask yourself: what would I do differently if nobody was watching? What work would I do if the only measure of success was whether it actually helped?

The answer to that question is probably the work you should actually be doing.

The legibility trap isn't that we should never measure anything or that all metrics are bad. It's that we mistake legible proxies for actual value, and then we optimize the proxies until they stop tracking value at all.

Real value is usually illegible—at least at first. It's complex, contextual, long-term. It doesn't show up on dashboards until much later, if at all. It requires judgment rather than measurement, and trust rather than proof.

The most important work you can do is probably work that nobody will notice you doing. The most valuable contribution you can make is probably something that won't show up in your performance review. The best way to spend your time is probably on things that are impossible to quantify.

And the hardest thing to do—much harder than optimizing for metrics—is to keep doing that valuable, illegible work even when the system rewards everyone around you for doing the opposite.

The people who create real value aren't the ones who optimize for dashboards. They're the ones who are willing to work on what matters even when nobody's keeping score. They're the ones who accept that their most important contributions might never be legible to the systems that distribute rewards.

They're the ones who do the work anyway.

The legibility trap convinces us that what can't be measured doesn't matter. But the truth is nearly opposite: what matters most is often impossible to measure accurately. The best engineers improve systems in ways that prevent problems that never happen. The best teachers develop capacities that unfold over decades. The best leaders create conditions for others to succeed and rarely get credit for it. Before you optimize for metrics, ask what you're not measuring. Before you judge someone's contribution, ask what invisible work enabled the visible results. The most valuable work is often the work nobody notices—until it stops happening and everything falls apart. That's when you discover that the invisible work wasn't optional after all.