[kevinventullo]

My take is that you don't get rewarded for it directly, but rather once you're finished, you can move on to the next thing without having to constantly firefight and squash bugs on the previous project. So ideally you can get a lot more done in a given half than someone who pushed out a pile of buggy spaghetti that they're now constantly having to deal with.

On the other hand, if you can ship something a few weeks faster that might have a few bugs, but the customer never notices, I can understand why a business would reward that.

[hawkesnest]

True, but my experience is that managers are not so great at recognizing consistent good results but often remember someone coming through in a clutch situation. Because measuring developer performance is hard, the consistently good dev is often overshadowed by the one who put out fires (even if they were the firestarter).

[msiyer]

I agree with you.