If you really want to fire someone, you're willing to bleed a little (or a lot) to do it. I've seen key personnel be let go, followed by a scramble to figure ou

If you really want to fire someone, you're willing to bleed a little (or a lot) to do it. I've seen key personnel be let go, followed by a scramble to figure out what only they know. In this case it sounds like a "junior quant" who built an application in "months of hard work" while working 12hrs x 7days, and using technologies they learned on the fly. Sounds like me in my 20s, but I wasn't as indispensable as I thought I was. In any case, that's not as hard to replace as the sysadmin who's been there for 10 years. From a different perspective, it's kind of like paying a contractor or offshore. You don't usually keep them on board after the deliverable, you hand it over to the in-house team to maintain it.