4 ms·

There’s 10x in almost every profession, why is engineering different? If you take physicists with Ph.D. plus 3 years of post-doc as the baseline, of course top

There’s 10x in almost every profession, why is engineering different? If you take physicists with Ph.D. plus 3 years of post-doc as the baseline, of course top physicists are 10x the baseline. And don't interpret the 10x in a superficial silly way which makes post-docs stronger than Einstein. This goes the same in sports, arts, academics, etc. As long as the field has enough depth for growth, the top players can easily be 10x compare to the majority.

Thiez 4y ago
You mention sports. I don't think most sports have a 10x difference between the worst and best professional athletes. Being 10 times faster or 10 times stronger is beyond human limits.
- dragonwriter 4y ago
  > I don't think most sports have a 10x difference between the worst and best professional athletes. Aggregate productivity metrics are...difficult. But if one assumes that salaries are roughly proportional to value produced, it's not uncommon to have >10:1 ratio in the top professional tier of a sport, much less the whole of a professional sport. E.g., the NFL has about a 25:1 ratio https://www.comparably.com/salaries/salaries-for-nfl-football-player https://www.comparably.com/salaries/salaries-for-nfl-footbal... MLB has a 700k minimum salary, a 1.1M median salary, a 4.4M mean salary, and a top salaries of $43.3M (that's a more than a 6:1 mean to minimum, and almost a 10:1 maximum to mean ratio, and over 60:1 overall ratio.) https://www.baseball-reference.com/bullpen/Minimum_salary https://www.baseball-reference.com/bullpen/Minimum_salary https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/mlb/2021/04/16/ap-study-mlb-salary-down-48-in-2-years-top-100-earn-half/43533631/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/mlb/2021/04/16/ap-stud... https://www.spotrac.com/mlb/rankings/average/ https://www.spotrac.com/mlb/rankings/average/ > Being 10 times faster or 10 times stronger is beyond human limits. “Fast” and “strong” measured in ways in which this is true are contributors to value produced, but not the measure of value produced by a player. A wide receiver that is the same in all other ways but runs half as fast as the fastest in the league isn't contributing half as much value.
  - Thiez 4y ago
    For the 10x programmer thing, the premise (as I understand it) is that the programmer can produce a working program in 1/10th of the time of a (terrible/average, the exact definition varies) programmer. So literally 10 times as fast. I think a reasonable sports comparison for the 10x dev must be a sport where people can perform/compete individually, such as athletics, weightlifting, diving, etc. Otherwise you get into handwavey arguments about contributed value. As for wages, having the best players can be worth 10x or 25x compared to having average players. This may be true even if the best players are "only" 2x as good as the worst ones. So I don't think the wages mean much.
- temp8964 4y ago
  Did I say don’t interpret 10x in a superficial silly way? A runner can be 10x better than another runner, but 10x better is not 10x faster.
  - Thiez 4y ago
    When is a runner 10 times better, then? For comparison, the mythical 10x developer can literally do tasks in 1/10th of the time.
    - dragonwriter 4y ago
      > the mythical 10x developer can literally do tasks in 1/10th of the time. Every form of the idea I’ve encountered other than from people criticizing it without identifying the source of the idea they were responding to has been about 10x overall value delivery, not 10x speed on individual microbenchmark tasks.

Thiez 4y ago

You mention sports. I don't think most sports have a 10x difference between the worst and best professional athletes. Being 10 times faster or 10 times stronger is beyond human limits.

dragonwriter 4y ago
> I don't think most sports have a 10x difference between the worst and best professional athletes. Aggregate productivity metrics are...difficult. But if one assumes that salaries are roughly proportional to value produced, it's not uncommon to have >10:1 ratio in the top professional tier of a sport, much less the whole of a professional sport. E.g., the NFL has about a 25:1 ratio https://www.comparably.com/salaries/salaries-for-nfl-football-player https://www.comparably.com/salaries/salaries-for-nfl-footbal... MLB has a 700k minimum salary, a 1.1M median salary, a 4.4M mean salary, and a top salaries of $43.3M (that's a more than a 6:1 mean to minimum, and almost a 10:1 maximum to mean ratio, and over 60:1 overall ratio.) https://www.baseball-reference.com/bullpen/Minimum_salary https://www.baseball-reference.com/bullpen/Minimum_salary https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/mlb/2021/04/16/ap-study-mlb-salary-down-48-in-2-years-top-100-earn-half/43533631/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/mlb/2021/04/16/ap-stud... https://www.spotrac.com/mlb/rankings/average/ https://www.spotrac.com/mlb/rankings/average/ > Being 10 times faster or 10 times stronger is beyond human limits. “Fast” and “strong” measured in ways in which this is true are contributors to value produced, but not the measure of value produced by a player. A wide receiver that is the same in all other ways but runs half as fast as the fastest in the league isn't contributing half as much value.
- Thiez 4y ago
  For the 10x programmer thing, the premise (as I understand it) is that the programmer can produce a working program in 1/10th of the time of a (terrible/average, the exact definition varies) programmer. So literally 10 times as fast. I think a reasonable sports comparison for the 10x dev must be a sport where people can perform/compete individually, such as athletics, weightlifting, diving, etc. Otherwise you get into handwavey arguments about contributed value. As for wages, having the best players can be worth 10x or 25x compared to having average players. This may be true even if the best players are "only" 2x as good as the worst ones. So I don't think the wages mean much.
temp8964 4y ago
Did I say don’t interpret 10x in a superficial silly way? A runner can be 10x better than another runner, but 10x better is not 10x faster.
- Thiez 4y ago
  When is a runner 10 times better, then? For comparison, the mythical 10x developer can literally do tasks in 1/10th of the time.
  - dragonwriter 4y ago
    > the mythical 10x developer can literally do tasks in 1/10th of the time. Every form of the idea I’ve encountered other than from people criticizing it without identifying the source of the idea they were responding to has been about 10x overall value delivery, not 10x speed on individual microbenchmark tasks.