That’s true for any hourly paid job. Employers can choose to fire those who don’t work efficiently enough. What they can’t do is not pay people for hours worked —and with tech it’s easy for them to tell how long you are logged in for, to avoid them underpaying you.

Having overtime pay that is a multiple of regular hourly rate is mandatory is many countries in Europe. Are you saying that European software tends to be more obfuscated? (answer: it is not).

Employees are also subject to the Working Time Directive in EU countries which sets limits to the amount of overtime that is permitted in a week and in a month. Unfortunately in most countries it's full of loop holes.

It is also in my interest to skip spotting bugs during code review so I can look like a genius when I fix them when they cause issues in production. Of course I don't do that because this is incredibly stupid and I have better ways to spend my time.

10x pay is significant. Personally, I would remediate asap even with $1500/hour on the line. I do have ethical standards.

But would I be as motivated to stop the root cause of the recurring issues that keeps giving me an extra $3k every shift? Well, I probably would, but my coworkers already need to be goaded into fixing root causes, and they're not getting paid extra!

In general, I think conflicts of interest must be handled carefully, and ideally avoided. Paying 10x wages when incidents happen is a clear conflict of interest.