When I was younger I was aware of the idea of perverse and misaligned incentives, but I never would have expected the extent to which they pervade practically every human institution.
Max Weber pretty much defined the modern conceit of bureaucracy. [1]
W.E Deming wrote extensively on the "American Disease". [2]
In a few words management and measurement are both inescapable beyond a certain organisational size, and they are the problem, because in almost all scenarios they will expand to displace/strangle the actual work.
It is a recognised general structural problem in systems.
Of course there is much more to it than the above simplification which may sound like an extreme philosophy - but I have yet to encounter good refutations or counterexamples to this tendency.
The answer, perhaps, is that small and many is beautiful.
At Google you could cheat the promotion system. Just spend more time optimizing for promo than for improving products for your customers, and you would be handsomely rewarded. You end up with the cheaters becoming the leaders and the good engineers leaving in frustration when they need to take orders from cheaters.