Programming is a non-scalable career (in the Talebian sense[1]), like being a lawyer or doctor. The relationship in earnings vs success is much closer to linear

Programming is a non-scalable career (in the Talebian sense[1]), like being a lawyer or doctor. The relationship in earnings vs success is much closer to linear, with the most successful programmers getting only about 10x (100x if we'rereally generous, but probably more like 2-4x on average) more than the least. In contrast pro sports are a scalable career, where incomes can scale separately from effort, similar to movie stars, authors and musicians. The relationship is an exponential with the very best earning the lion share of the income of the entire industry, earning literally millions of times more than those at the bottom of the industry. Given a certain amount of effort invested in your career so far, if you know you're middle of the road of a scalable career, and it's becoming less and less likely that you'll hit the top 1 percentile, then I would think that the likelihood that you should perhaps look to change career should be much higher than if you were middle of the road in a non scalable career. [1] https://casnocha.com/2009/03/scalable-vs-non-scalable-careers.html https://casnocha.com/2009/03/scalable-vs-non-scalable-career...