The real issue is that software has many bugs as the sum of all contributes to it, and all it takes is finding one.
What I mean is that it takes just one sloppy developer to introduce a bug, and that's all you need.
Making unbreakable software is a much harder task than breaking it.
It's not about who's smarter, it's about what's easier.
I wrote code with no pressure, tested it used it for months, and with some input that I didn't think about it broke spectacularly... I might be below average programmer (although I would say no, from what I have seen so far), but as I said, the chain is just as strong as its weakest link.
Like, what? “Thank god, I only hire developers with a skill level of 78 so it will take a developer of skill level 79 or above to even have a chance at finding a bug here, and we all know skill level 79 developers are rare so I’m secure!”
This isn’t an RPG, life is full of unquantifiable things and differing conflicting incentives. If anything, the domains in which exceptionally skilled developers often work and the tools they use make bugs more common.
It doesn’t take a Linus Trovalds to find bugs in Linus Trovalds’s code.
By the way the worst clusterfuck I ever saw was caused by a very talented programmer that implemented a very complex object store on disk... the thing was brittle at best, and it failed in very spectacular ways.
Very entertaining to debug