Rather than paying a particularly good programmer 10x as much, you can just hire 10 mediocre programmers, and they will probably get more done. Not in

Rather than paying a particularly good programmer 10x as much, you can just hire 10 mediocre programmers, and they will probably get more done. Not in finance; let me tell you from my experience poorly building a bitcoin trading bot over a few weekends, I lost money (play money) from silly off by one mistakes and not having a proper grasp of the statistics I was using. In this type of situation, only a real quant is likely to make money, and the 10 other guys will lose everything in fairly short order. Likewise in crypto: how many average programmers would you have to put in a room to write a secure storage system like Tarsnap? But, I will agree with you in the general case: CRUD apps. There are lots of features and no one person can quickly crank them out no matter how "x" they are, so in these types of jobs, you really can get much more done with 10 average programmers.