This is endemic to our industry. The problem really is short-sighted management. They only value something that shows themselves in good light with their superiors.
Managers absolutely don't seem to care about actually building a team and cultivating a culture of success.
Engineering managers are way way worse than Soccer managers in this regard.
I would put this all on the hiring processes right from how we hire engineers and managers and what gets a promotion. But unfortunately, our industry would rather remain blind.
The people usually tasked with figuring these things out are new to the team. There can be all kinds of politics and interpersonal baggage with helping the new person with old configuration/ compilation/ deployment stuff.
Often, it'll take one of the legacy leads to step in and clean things up. By then, everyone's annoyed at the new person, and the failure of this effort will get saddled on their back for some time more.
I had this exact issue at a recent gig, and the application architect spent months poking at jenkins to get a clean build. Once he quit in frustration, one of the legacy leads re-engineered the whole thing, in a different language, in a few days.
Legacy lead was one of those "untouchables" in the eyes of the CEO, so there was no influencing him to help earlier, and his reticence cost us a good application architect.
To my mind, this is often a sign of a poisoned, political company culture. The work can be done, but there are non-technical reasons why progress can't be made, even by earnest effort.
Often the non-technical reasons are "management doesn't want to assign the super-lead to the work, but also doesn't want to let the new hire have free reign to rewrite a legacy product. Just fix it."
I've often wondered whether this dynamic is exactly the reason tech culture is ageist. If we hired older developers, the culturally-assumed "gravitas" of age would make their relative social status to more-"senior"-but-younger devs illegible. We might actually have to sometimes give them the right-of-way on making the changes they want to make, even though they're new!
Every company I've worked at for software development has had review / feedback opportunities for my manager. I can't imagine working at a company where feedback from direct reports wasn't a major factor in someone's job performance evaluation.
Then again, I've been very selective in where I work. People like to bash the "culture" stereotype, but it's definitely something I consider when I'm looking for a job... you know, how people are expected to interact with other people, not whether there are ball pits and the like.
I don't think it's specific to our industry. I think it's specific to the corporate system we have, and that it correlates with the sense of ownership and freedom that we give people. When it's "every man for himself", you're going to see that optimization toward individual metrics and protection of personal reputation, even if it means that a colleague's reputation is deprived.
When you have a recognized long-term leader that doesn't need to constantly re-justify their involvement and existence (something akin to a BDFL), more collaborative group efforts can be fostered, and individual gamification is much less useful, because the people who know your behavior are going to be there for a long time and there is a lot of personal continuity. This system is, of course, not without its own type of flaws, but it doesn't have the same negative feedback incentives for individual contributors.
It's hard to get that long-term involvement in the tech industry specifically because the rapid rate of technical change limits career length and portability. Skills in language/system/framework X rarely retain marketability for more than 3-5 years. Most people don't have the stamina, interest, or whatever it is that's needed to keep up with the constant re-education and re-justification cycle into their 40s and 50s. They look for an out: early retirement, promotions into non-coding management positions, etc.
To the extent that individual metric gamification is higher-than-normal in tech, I would attribute most of it to the effect of shorter career tenures, both overall and at specific companies.
I think short-term thinking by superiors causes short-term behavior by reports.
If the management pays fairly, with fair raises, fair balance, fair acknowledgement of all kinds of work and not just the flashy stuff, most reports would focus on the right things, do their jobs well and not look to switch jobs all the time.
But if the management is always trying to escape giving promotions/raises, does not acknowledge the underlying effort to get something to production, only thinks about their own empires (basically short-term selfish thinking) it will cause a disproportionately high number of reports to behave the same aka look out for their selfish interests.
I am absolutely certain that top companies look to retain good players (top != stock price or market cap).
Managers absolutely don't seem to care about actually building a team and cultivating a culture of success.
Engineering managers are way way worse than Soccer managers in this regard.
I would put this all on the hiring processes right from how we hire engineers and managers and what gets a promotion. But unfortunately, our industry would rather remain blind.