At the same time it doesn’t matter how good you are at programming: bugs *are* an inevitability, and the only fix for that is to give a game sufficient dedicated bugfixing and polishing time. This rarely happens in modern PC game development, and with the advent of console patching is becoming less and less common on the consoles too.

Modern management tends to like it when the quality of your product is some simple function of the money you throw at it – the problem is in game development this only works for art assets and marketing, not for programming. Which is why AAA developers produce beautiful yet bug-ridden games.

Given a semi-competent art direction you can basically hire 50% more artists (composers, modelers, animators, etc.) and expect about 50% more output. This is not true for programming, where there actually is such a thing as too many people working on a given codebase.

As a mediocre programmer myself I’ve seen it in action: A good programmer can easily be as productive as 5 mediocre ones, a brilliant programmer can replace 5 good ones. A careful and intelligent software design can literally save months of work. These ratios depend on the productive team members’ thinking styles being compatible and the organization’s ability to grant them certain liberties. A well-composed team of good programmers can be much more than the sum of its parts and an extra programmer who doesn’t fit in can actually reduce its productivity.

No amount of money you throw at a really productive team can increase its output beyond a certain point, which means that no amount of money can make them meet an earlier deadline without sacrificing quality. And since good and brilliant developers tend to have a strong inner motivation to create quality works, the requirement to sacrifice quality to meet some marketing-imposed deadline tends to drive them away from such environments.

In any case, it seems like money actually makes you dumber; it exposes you to investors and upper management who don’t give a crap, bloats your team into a soul-less design-by-committee monster, and squeezes out individualism and humanity. I remember Dan Harmon saying the same thing in a webcast of some talk he gave; can’t remember which one.