How come professional algo developers aren't zillionaires?

[timmbbo]

This is a bit of a glib question, but here goes: How come professional algo developers aren't zillionaires?


If you're writing algos for a living, that means you get exposed to a great variety of ideas and approaches. Of course, most of them are probably crap, but they also probably come across a few winning ideas as well. So, how come they aren't using those ideas and making $$$ for themselves? Likewise, if a professional algo writer is so good, why don't they just write their own wining algos and live off that?

Something seems fishy here...

[eDanny]

If someone pays you to write code to their specs, how would you, as the coder know if it is a winning algo? Would you spend days, weeks testing someone else's code? What about NDA's prohibiting usage? How would you have time for more jobs if you were testing everything?