[atomicnumber3]

"It just doesn’t really get rewarded."

This is the entirety of the problem. Also why open source programs are so often "surprisingly" high quality.

Bad reward functions in companies don't just not reward people who do good work. It *actively punishes* them because stack ranking is a zero-sum game. And as much as people joke about stack ranking and lambast the dinosaurs who used to do it on purpose, it's still how it all actually work. It's just distributed stack ranking - each manager and manager of managers has their own local stack rank that bubbles up to who gets fired and who gets promoted.

So people who throw shit at the wall and make product that sell but have a shitty user experience get promoted and people who plod along and make things that work, or fix things that are broken (but not so much that they don't sell) filter to the bottom of the list and get cut, or leave when they don't get promoted or get raises.

Sure, there's some golden mix in between throwing shit at the wall and fixing key UX-ruining bugs. But these people still get outcompeted by people who purely ship n scoot.