Promotion Driven Development at its finest. There's no good way to fix this without better teams and less Lord of the Flies style management. Servant leadership helps here, but if your team is adversarial in nature there is no escape. A manager that needs an exciting story to get a feather in their hat will take the story every time over "+20 -8000" commit style developers. Your product will suffer accordingly.

A lot of this boils down to promo system being so systematized. I've never heard of people in any other field min/max their promotions as hard along with all of the expert jargon in any other field I've worked in. Packets, peers, comp, other co comps, what your boss thinks of you, what your boss thinks of your peers (nee: competitors), and the inevitable crash out when they don't get the promotion. All part of the bigco experience! I feel like when we systematized comp into ranks Lx, Ly we gave up our leverage a little bit.