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>, I'm not a big fan of the superstar idea. The only area where you can even have indentifiably top performers is in sports, [...] You found a 10x guy, good for

• paulcole 6y ago
  > John Carmack (Doom, Oculus) There are hundreds of thousands of companies whose needs are so pedestrian (whether they want to admit it or not) that paying for John Carmack wouldn’t be worth it. There’s no La Liga team that wouldn’t get better (and wouldn’t make a shitload more money) with Messi on their roster.
  • kgwgk 6y ago
    And there are tens of thousands of football teams for which paying for Messi wouldn't be worth it (including many of the teams you refer to, in fact). I'm not sure what's your point.
    • yt-sdb 6y ago
      I think OP’s point is that stardom in certain domains, e.g. sports, can pay for itself via merchandise, ticket sales, advertising. OP is arguing that this isn’t really true in programming.
      • tovacinni 6y ago
        It sort of can; something I observed while I was still a student at a "top CS university" is that there were certain individuals (superstars) in the school that a lot of people looked up to, and whichever companies they chose to do internships at or work full-time at, everyone else would want to go there. This happened even if the company was a mostly no-name startup. So purely from a recruiting standpoint; if this sort of phenomenon happens at an undergraduate level, I can believe that just having John Carmack on your team alone can bring more talent in, for potentially cheaper just because of increased supply.
    • paulcole 6y ago
      Messi’s marketing value would be incredible. There’s more to a sports team than on-field performance.
      • kgwgk 6y ago
        And somehow he's staying at FC Barcelona because he didn't find anyone willing to pay to have him transferred.
        • paulcole 6y ago
          I thought that was because his release clause was way too high? Just because somebody can add value doesn’t mean that their current cost is equal to their value. Any top flight club in the world would fall over themselves to pay Messi’s weekly wages. Nobody wants to pay nearly a billion euro for that right.
  • deleted 6y ago
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  • dmurray 6y ago
    That's not comparing like with like. There are 20 La Liga teams, all of which are say in the top 200 football teams in the world. Adding Carmack to one of the "hundreds of thousands" of companies would be like adding Messi to your local pub team: it would make it better, you'd win your local league, but it wouldn't pay the $20 million a year that would make it "worth it". The number of companies that could consider hiring Carmack is maybe 1-2 orders of magnitude above those who could consider hiring Messi.
    • paulcole 6y ago
      Except Messi adds incredible value beyond his on-field performance.
  • jackcviers3 6y ago
    > pedestrian You could argue that someone like John would invent a system in a few months that simply took a very low level engineering mind to run that would cover all those needs. You pay him for one year and get ten years of business out of his system. There are 10x programmers, even 1000x programmers. They invent protocols, programming languages, databases, IDEs, tools, operating systems, cryptology, algorithms, frameworks and libraries that are used at all your 100,0000+ companies doing pedestrian stuff to do the pedestrian stuff. Try to imagine a completely closed source world where everything had to be made from scratch. What percentage of those pedestrian companies would succeed? These people are and were giants that have provided billions in revenue to the world economy. That's indisputable. We stand on their shoulders, and because they are broad enough to look like an endless plain to us in the multitude, we claim that there are no giants.
• switch11 6y ago
  Agreed 100% with this What the person wrote before is ludicrous because coding scales much, much better than sports I'm not a big fan of the superstar idea. The only area where you can even have indentifiably top performers is in sports, where you have a contest that someone is going to win, and you want to pay up for the guy who is marginally better than the next guy. * I've worked at one of the trillion dollar companies, at a smaller company that sold for $4 billion, and now run my own startup In each case I saw examples of this For the company that sold at $4 billion, the top two developers were at least 100x developers at the trillion dollar company, there were many developers in 10X to 100X range, not just a few and in my startup I'm lucky to have two 1000x developers Of the examples given, I'd say Linus and Carmack and Simonyi for sure I'd also say Stallman * I also had 2 college friends who were somewhere between 100X and 500X one of them coded an entire stock trading platform as a project for a one semester college course. The Professor was astonished and so was everyone else It was fully working the other worked on making a mobile version of an enterprise product. His team freaked out because he did more on his solo project than a 200+ developer team that was the 'official team doing it' seems they gave it to my friend/college mate just to see if he had some new approach. They didn't expect he'd do more than the official team * People don't understand mindset we had one person in our college, this was back in 1999, he coded a FULL multi person chat software (like ICQ, but not as polished) in his first year summer vacation AS A HOBBY If you really think someone like that is 'only marginally better' than people who clock in for 30 hours and then run back for 'work life balance' then you don't really understand coding Coding is an art and a science and you need practice and you need a sort of neural network in your head that keeps learning stuff specific to coding