Agency problem. Those who decide budgets and project timelines get the upside in such a bonus scheme, while whose who implement get the downside. Clawback bonuses, and the engineers not only get blamed, they get laid off to make the quarterly numbers for the management who want to make up for lost bonuses.

I suspect the solution lays in the spec complexity. Haven’t thought of this much, so my wrongthink knee jerk reaction is make a set of reference test harnesses part of the SOT of the spec, and that is the first step towards more robust implementations. Would like to hear how others have approached this problem space.