Would a hospital staffed only by highly skilled surgeons constantly performing unassisted emergency surgery economically out-compete a hospital with nurses and receptionists?

I'm more commenting on the effectiveness of arguing through shitty analogy. There's no logical reason to imagine any of this let alone compare it to the programming industry. It breeds disagreement, distraction, and useless side-discussion that treads water and makes people angry at each other.

And if you want to keep taking this to an extreme, using the shitty analogys provided:

Would a hospital with 5 highly trained surgeons and no receptionists or nurses complete more surgery than a hospital with no surgeons and 100 nurses and 600 receptionists? Yes. But now we're saying absolutely nothing about the programming industry or what's we think is wrong with it.

> and you could run an emergency hospital without receptionists.

Not for long, at least in the US, without replacing receptionists at least 1:1 with other people doing the job of receptionists (which, in the emergency room of a hospital, is entirely about getting identification, signed consent for treatment, and insurance/payment information from patients so that the hospital gets paid for the service it provides.)

To pull the analogy through to the extremes, even a highly skilled surgeon might not be able to do it because he doesn't know how to improvise, refuses to operate in a non-hospital environment, or insert a billion other reasons in here.

tl;dr, T-shaped skillsets are good, specialists are good.