You Can't Incentivise a Pipeline That Doesn't Break

I worked alongside a data engineer who was, by every formal measure, the best performer on the team. He was also quietly destroying the platform. Not maliciously. He was optimising for the thing being measured. His work shipped fast because he skipped the edge case analysis. He closed tickets at first resolution without ever checking whether the underlying pattern would recur. He didn’t review anyone else’s PRs (not his KPIs, so why would he?).