1) Not so sure this is true. You may get more done individually in the short-term, but over the long-term, your anti-social behavior will cause the rest of your team to shut you out in turn, and your lack of visibility and understanding into what your team is working on will affect your future productivity and earnings. This is a Nash equilibrium at work, and good management will explain how the Nash equilibrium of co-operating on teamwork serves everyone's best individual long-term interests, even if the metrics naively seem to favor short-term action.
2) You don't need to adjust feature development metrics to get technical debt paid down. You set a target (e.g. 20% time to paying down debt), build a backlog of technical debt you know about, and either add the tasks to your sprint/version target (rewarding the team for completing them, like any other task) or come up with some other manner of getting them done, like Boy Scout code reviews (i.e. leave the codebase cleaner than you found it or fail review).
3) If you think you can ship better code by forcing arbitrary deadlines, then I hate to break it to you, but if the beatings continue, morale will not improve. And if you think you can substitute metrics and cash bonuses for good management skills to get people to work long hours so that you'll ship by the start of the holiday season (or other real deadline), then you don't understand how metrics is a tool for management and not a replacement for management.
I think I phrased my third point poorly, since I seem to have conveyed exactly the opposite effect that I intended. What I'm saying is that if you tie pay to performance against arbitrary deadlines, you're effectively paying engineers to pad their estimates. Estimation is definitely a pretty major game as it is, and we do ourselves no favors by paying people to play it more aggressively.
2) You don't need to adjust feature development metrics to get technical debt paid down. You set a target (e.g. 20% time to paying down debt), build a backlog of technical debt you know about, and either add the tasks to your sprint/version target (rewarding the team for completing them, like any other task) or come up with some other manner of getting them done, like Boy Scout code reviews (i.e. leave the codebase cleaner than you found it or fail review).
3) If you think you can ship better code by forcing arbitrary deadlines, then I hate to break it to you, but if the beatings continue, morale will not improve. And if you think you can substitute metrics and cash bonuses for good management skills to get people to work long hours so that you'll ship by the start of the holiday season (or other real deadline), then you don't understand how metrics is a tool for management and not a replacement for management.