I am seeing a variation of this play out slowly at work, which I definitely would call theft. For context, we have a bonus structure in place that awards bonuse

I am seeing a variation of this play out slowly at work, which I definitely would call theft. For context, we have a bonus structure in place that awards bonuses for performance. The actual measurement of work done is actually pretty alright, as it's left to human judgement and not just numbers. However, it creates a severe moral hazard - I am incentivised to spend as little time as possible on each task, so that I can finish more tasks and appear more productive at the end of the quarter. I often run into code where it seems the author left a lot of tech debt for the sake of fixing the one task they were given. We have processes in place that are meant to prevent bad code from getting into master, and they do work - you can't just sneak absolute garbage past code review, but still everyone involved is incentivised to only let through the minimum acceptable version of the code that will hold together until bonuses are calculated next quarter. The part where this becomes theft is when next quarter your mess impedes my progress, my velocity goes down, which means my bonus goes down, which means you have literally stolen money from me. I often think about this when interacting with commercial software that has bugs and rough edges. Am I in pain right now because somebody maximised their performance bonus three years ago? Are these issues the results not of incompetence, but of simple min-maxing? At the end, we all reap what we sow, and I can but hope that my mortgage gets paid before the reaper comes to harvest.