how would this work? in sales it is straight forward, yes? you sell X, above projected Y, you get rewarded Z. how would this even work in software? I am projected to fix 37 bugs per week, I get bonus if I fix 51?

the thing is, sales are very individualized in general where software dev is team effort, I worked on myriad of projects/companies/… and besides “worked 4 weekends in a row to get a release out and was rewarded with ____” (should be rare occurence) I can’t imagine any reward scenario that would incentivize us

Rarely, because incentives encourage gaming the system. In sales, it is fairly easy to make the game benefit both the sales folks and the business because sales directly drives revenue. Game it however you want, everyone wins. But software does not directly translate into revenue, so once you start setting up incentives, gaming that system can completely derail the actual business goals unless you are exceedingly careful about it.

The only time I've seen sales-like incentives work is in hourly consulting shops, where you can incentivize increasing the billable hours. In that case, the software work does directly translate to revenue.