I once heard that at Google advancement (and thus salary increase) is significantly pinned to shipping new things. As a result, nobody is incentivized to work on maintenance or improvement of existing things. Everybody wants to ship something new, so they can ride along with it up the corporate elevator.
Counterpoint: I've been promoted 5 times (last was to Director), and i've never shipped anything new, only worked on maintenance or improvement of existing things.
FYI, HN doesn't really have markdown, so that link doesn't work. Instead, generally we do something like this:
> It was probably via this Quora answer[1]
> I don't think that's entirely accurate. There are efforts to reward Product Excellence, for example, which involved UX polish, performance tuning etc.
