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

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