I sometimes think about how, as human beings, we tend to confuse symbols of value with value itself. That’s because value—being something more ephemeral is much harder to see or know.
A Historical Example
Let me give you an example. When the Spanish conquistadors came to the Americas and conquered the Inca Empire, one thing of great interest to them was gold. They found the Inca Emperor with gold artifacts in his possession items of worship, decorations, and beautiful works of art.
Now, here’s the thing about the Inca and gold. For them, gold wasn’t currency. It wasn’t a store of wealth in the way the Spanish understood it. The Inca called gold “the sweat of the sun.” It was sacred. It was used to honor their gods, to decorate their temples, to create masks and ceremonial objects. They represented centuries of craftsmanship, religious significance, and cultural identity.
At that point in time, the Spanish had developed a taste for gold. So they took the emperor Atahualpa hostage and demanded that gold be used to fill a room for his ransom. According to historical accounts, the room was about 22 feet long by 17 feet wide, and Atahualpa promised to fill it with gold as high as he could reach somewhere around 8 feet high.
Through this, they extracted practically all the gold available in that country. Messengers went out across the empire. Gold poured in from temples, palaces, sacred sites. Llama caravans carried it across mountains. The Inca people, hoping to save their emperor, stripped their civilization of its most precious objects.
The Tragedy of Melting Culture
Here’s the problem: the gold didn’t come as raw material—it came as beautiful works of art. We’re talking about intricate golden representations of corn, llamas, and other animals. Ceremonial vessels. Wall panels from the Temple of the Sun in Cusco. Jewelry that had been worn by generations of nobility.
Instead of preserving these cultural treasures, the Spanish melted everything down into ingots (gold bars) and shipped them back to their home country. They had furnaces set up. They worked systematically. And piece by piece, an entire artistic tradition irreplaceable works that modern museums would consider priceless was reduced to a pale yellow metal.
Even after Atahualpa fulfilled his promise, they killed him anyway.
In this way, items of great cultural value were lost. An entire civilization’s artistic heritage practically disappeared, melted down into mere symbols of value—gold bars. To be clear, this did end up having a devastating effect on Spain’s economy, but that’s a story for another day. All that gold flooding into Europe caused massive inflation. It didn’t make Spain richer in any meaningful sense—it just made their currency worth less.
The Modern Workplace Parallel
Taking it back to a much smaller scale, we see this same pattern in our day-to-day work life. Sometimes you find teams spending enormous amounts of time:
- Reviewing story point numbers
- Obsessing over engineer productivity metrics
- Measuring lines of code committed
I’ve been in engineering review sessions where engineers were flagged for performance because their committed lines of code were very low. Which was sad, because everyone in the room knew this was absurd. Yet somehow, it still finds its way into how we evaluate engineer performance.
This is what I call confusing symbols of value with actual value.
A Better Approach
I think this is a concept we’ll continue to see in many places. There’s no easy way to eliminate it entirely, but there is a way to mitigate it: ensure that any item of value you’re measuring is captured using at least two metrics, and those metrics should agree.
For example, if you want to look at lines of code an engineer is pushing out, you might want to add:
- Number of bugs in the code being pushed
- Number of times that code is executed in customer use cases
- Something else that brings a level of sanity check
The Spanish Could Have Done Better
If the Spanish had thought about success with more than just “how much gold can we extract,” they might have considered:
- What can we learn from this culture?
- What intelligence can we develop and integrate into our own society?
Or even more simply, if they’d balanced the amount of gold against economic productivity, they would have immediately seen the problem. Introducing significant amounts of gold that isn’t tied to any new goods, services, or meaningful increase in the economy’s capacity to produce is guaranteed to drive inflation or worse.
And that’s my thought for today. Thank you.