Okay, here's an extremely unscientific rebuttal to your sports analogy. There are 13,700 professional athletes in the United States [0], compared to 670,000 am

Okay, here's an extremely unscientific rebuttal to your sports analogy. There are 13,700 professional athletes in the United States [0], compared to 670,000 amateur athletes in the Amateur Athletic Union [1] (there are surely many more outside of that particular group but let's go with it). That gives us a 2% rate of 10x athleticism. Let's assume that 10x engineers occur at the same rate as athletic exceptionalism (yes, that's silly but why not). According to another questionable statistic, there were 1,114,000 software developers in the US in 2014 [2]. Now we've already established that outstanding engineers occur at the same rate as professional atheletes. What does that give us? Tens of thousands of professional 10x engineers. [0] http://www.bls.gov/ooh/entertainment-and-sports/athletes-and-sports-competitors.htm http://www.bls.gov/ooh/entertainment-and-sports/athletes-and... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amateur_Athletic_Union https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amateur_Athletic_Union [2] http://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/software-developers.htm http://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/s...