The "golden abacus" instead of "golden handcuffs?"
Or as my undergrad mathematics advisor described friends who left academics for finance, "they spend their days clipping (stock) coupons instead of solving math problems - not as interesting but more interest."
You could be apply for grants all day and doing uber at the weekends you sell out!
* performance analysis/monitoring tools. Most developers are astoundingly bad at performance and then lie about it with weird unfounded guesses
* markdown to html parser or the opposite. Most developers have no idea the actual cost of involvement required for basic string parsing and wrongly believe it’s free
* network proxy. Aside from authentication this is mind blowingly simple. Most developers will supremely over engineer this
* API documentation. In a world where the average developer struggles to write an email actually describing inputs, purpose, and outputs clear enough for a stranger to follow can be quite the impossibility
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That is taken from a recent comment in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42157595
As an aside I think where I have seen bad performance it has been mostly architectural choices over O(N) stuff. These take a lot of organizational will power to fix properly as it costs money, time and egos.