> Every company I've worked for has had some core group of people who cared about doing good work and doing the right thing... but they're actually operating adversarially in a way that collects the most rewards with the least effort.

Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy! The people who game the system eventually move to further enforce the system (for their own benefit), at the expense of the purpose the for which the system was first put in place.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Pournelle#Pournelle's_la...