[retrocryptid]

it's not the only thing they measure. but if you're at the front end of a project, you often don't have other metrics (issues closed, internal customers giving you props, etc.) so the classic (and mostly flawed) measures of performance are used.

It should also surprise no-one that design documents are not considered deliverables, only code. There's no motivation to fix a crap design. You generally have to do the absolute minimum documentation your management chain will accept, then push out some code, let it fail, then redesign it in your spare time and start pushing out incremental changes as part of your bug fixing work.

I never saw anyone intentionally build crap designs / code so they could then get props for fixing the bugs they introduced, but there were several times people didn't have time to think through the problem and built crap code that led to sev 1 / sev 2 problems. People weren't trying to build crap code, it's just a side effect of being judged on how well you implement code, not on how well you design systems.