I can only respond to this with two cliches: 1) A team of mediocre performers will never give you anything more than mediocre results. 2) Nine women can't mak

I can only respond to this with two cliches: 1) A team of mediocre performers will never give you anything more than mediocre results. 2) Nine women can't make a baby in one month. Programming definitely has a cap on both quality and productivity. And the only way to the maximize the results is with better people. Not more. The problem is that until about the last two decades, most programming was done in non-competitive fields (internal enterprise IT), so nobody gave much of a fuck about quality or productivity. Nowadays, most of us work in a context where software is crucial to a company's competitive edge. However, the monetary rewards and social standing of programmers is still very much based on the era of corporate IT (especially outside the SV bubble), and we are only slowly catching up. Meanwhile the industry is desperately trying to put the genie back into the bottle, first through outsourcing (most of which failed miserably, because good programmers do way more than just code shit), later through wage-theft conspiracies and attempting to lower the barriers for importing cheap foreign programmers.