[derangedHorse]

The game theory should make is that those teams that recurring lay lose customers due to issues will be punished accordingly. If they aren’t, then maybe the problems that result from shipping fast don’t impact customer retention as much as might think.

[JohnMakin]

Not necessarily. Not every job is shipping features that are visible to customers, or even to management.

You see this pattern of "make fire, put it out, get rewarded" a lot on devops type teams, almost always by the lead (IME). Often it is very difficult to determine customer impact of these types of events, especially if monitoring/alerting is lacking (very common), and even if it isn't, often these same teams have the ability to turn those knobs any way they want anyway.

[Arainach]

This works across small entities like companies with distinct customers and budgets.

It does not work for large corporations with pools of billions of dollars and various incentives to staying within the ecosystem. It's impossible to measure the contribution of one feature team to perception and retention of something like "Microsoft Intune" or "Google Chrome", and without the ability to measure that no effective check on those teams.

[jiggawatts]

The most spectacular instance of this I've seen is Jeffrey Snover getting demoted for "forcing" PowerShell onto Microsoft. Meanwhile from a customer perspective its the only good thing about Windows Server and the only reason I haven't pushed for 100% Linux adoption everywhere I work!

See: https://corecursive.com/building-powershell-with-jeffrey-sno...

[PrimalPower]

Exactly game theory is that is that everyone make more as a "Senior" or "Mid-Level" in a wealthy/successful org over a "Staff" or "Senior" at a poorer one with less customers.

Of course, game theory implies "infinite games" and of course the real world doesn't operate like that.

And large bureaucratic orgs collapse under their own weight, and the enshittification is the norm despite the number of paying customers.