Google doesn't disincentivize any of that, they just don't encourage it. Google has mechanisms for rewarding people for doing extraordinary work: peer bonuses, spot bonuses. People who make outsized contributions are compensated, and people who consistently contribute more than others are promoted. But systems that require heroic efforts to continue functioning are fundamentally broken and unsustainable, and need to be made easier to maintain.
I left Google recently, partly over the fact that they strongly disincentivize taking technical risks.
Let's just level set for a second:
* Peer bonuses are a fixed $175 and spot bonuses are usually under $1000, and pretty much always under $5000.
* The coveted "feats of engineering award" (or whatever they changed the name to this time), which has the highest prestige factor of any of the internal awards, is $2000 cash or a trip somewhere.
* A senior SWE at Google makes about $300k. A Staff SWE makes $400-500k. An entry-level SWE makes $150-200k.
What this means is that the only REAL reward on offer (other than a token amount of cash and a serotonin-inducing certificate) is a promotion. Promotions almost always come when you launch products (actually, they changed the benchmark to "landing" products, which seems to always happen about 6-12 months after launch after the bugs are worked out).
Launches at Google are almost always significant efforts - either in terms of engineering around the company's arcane systems that are changing underneath you or in terms of getting through all of the process checks that ensure your service is "googly." Further, to go from a "launch" to a "landing" is mostly a political process: you have to convince enough of your management team that you have met some arbitrary milestone that indicates a stable product. As such, people are not too happy to take significant technical risks if they involve spending more than a few months on a project - if you want to get promoted, wasting time on something that might fail is bad. Why would you want to "land" a risky product when you can "land" something that is already on the roadmap?
Additionally, Google offers pretty much no promotion credit to engineers for "prospecting" - what I will call the process of identifying products that should go on the roadmap. That means that if you go out and do this sort of work, you are actively hindering your career: if you go prospecting, you are going to spend months not "landing" things. Conversely, prospecting seems to be a very good way to get peer and spot bonuses.
This is why Google provides no real benefits for taking technical risks. The only real reward is promotion, and promotions come mostly from following the roadmap, not from rocking the boat. The other awards and bonuses are basically toys by comparison.
I don't disagree with your broader point, but I'll make a small nit that I don't think peer/spot bonuses are a meaningful-enough portion of TC that they matter from a financial perspective (unless the numbers have changed significantly over the years). The 'kudos' part of it was more meaningful to me.
People just want their work to mean something, to be contributing to success. Heroism is the full commitment to that. Of course it’s riskier, and based on people over processes, but again and again it’s the inspired that build the future. Work-life balance needn’t suffer, work just needs to be more than a job.
