> In my career I have seen almost identical systems being built by a) 6 developers in a startup in 1 year b) 100+ developers in a big company with a much much larger budget in 2 years.

I spent a decade in the public sector of Denmark and I've since got into helping non-SWE startups transition into enterprise organisations as far as digitalisation goes. So I've seen quite a lot of this. I've also had the pleasure to be on basically every sides of the table, from developer, architect, manager to buyer and consultant. I think it's always down to the business processes and the management.

Sure "rockstars" are a thing in SWE, I'm frankly one of them. However I don't think the difference between a 10x and a 1x/rockstar/whatever buzzword developer is necessarily too much about our technical abilities or talent. In my opinion it's often mainly defined by your organisational prowess. If you're the type of developer who can get things done, make an impact and create business value, you're going to be given a lot of freedom and you're eventually going to settle into "rockstar" roles. This is soooo much easier in smaller organisations where the restrictions you face on how you can work are often small-non-existant. Maybe you're even going to build some of the restrictions yourself, by defining how your organisations wants to lint, which techs you want to use and so on.

As things grow, more and more people are going to enter the work processes. Some of them are going to be hired to work on the work processes themselves, and eventually you're going to end up with this quagmire of bullshit red-tape. It's there with good intentions, of course it is, nobody goes to work meaning to make the world a worse place, but all the control and the business intelligence is usually an illusion of sorts. At least in my experience. Now, if you have good managers they'll build teams and manage the processes in a way that doesn't get too much in the way, but over the years, you're going to have a lot of bad managers involved in the processes. You're likely also going to work for an organisation where upper management doesn't care about digitalisation, at least not really, despite the fact that 90% of their work force is on a computer 8 hours a day. So eventually you're going to end up with an environment where it's hard to get things done.

What is worse, often the best developers. The people who are able to deliver a lot of visible business value, are going to be plucked by management in attempts to try and use them to make other developers produce more value. Meaning that many organisations tie their best development resources up in advisory roles and waste them away in endless meetings.

So it's not that those 6 developers are necessarily better than the 100. It's that sometimes, a team of 6 developers get to do more actual work than 100 developers combined do in a year.

Obviously that's only part of it. There is a whole range of other things that impact why big organisations suck. Because the quality of the 6 man team isn't necessarily on par with the 100+ developer team if you look at the application at scale over a decade. At least not in my experience. This might not matter when you're small, but it will matter when you're IBM because a few bad years will wreck your reputation for decades.

> So, spend 10-50x less and get higher quality?

You're never going to convince businesses that it's less risky to buy from a small company. It's not like CEOs are stupid. They might not care about IT too much, and they certainly hate it when IBM fails to deliver on time and that it'll cost extra to get the thing to actually work. But they do know that it will eventually work when they go to the 100+ developer company. They don't necessarily know this when they go to the 6 man team.

In fact, one of the primary reasons you hear so much more about the 100+ developer teams is because often the small startup will simply go bankrupt when the contract fails. I'm currently working on fixing one such thing, I can't tell you much more than that, but lets just say, that the 100+ developer company would've been the wiser option.

Now, sometimes you do get the better quality, the faster deliverance and the better product form the 6 developer startup, so it's not like you're wrong either. It's just that most decision makers hates risk.

ps. Sorry IBM.