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Elite accountants usually get promoted into CFO positions, where they are very important and get a huge paycheck. There is a huge difference between a good and

by amix 12y ago

Elite accountants usually get promoted into CFO positions, where they are very important and get a huge paycheck. There is a huge difference between a good and an amazing CFO. I think 10X people exist in any area, including accounting and programming. E.g. John Carmack, Linus Torvalds, Poul-Henning Kamp. Some top accountants can be found by looking at CFO positions of huge companies. These people are very rare tho' and most of us have probably not worked with a 10X person. Just like most of us have not played football with a "Ronaldo-level" player.

TheOtherHobbes 12y ago
There are probably also 100X people - and they're mostly unemployable in any conventional sense. (Maybe Wolfram and Kurzweil?) I think the bar for top talent is higher than is obvious, and it's lower than it used to be. It's not at the level of 'smart and gets a lot of stuff done' - it's at the level of good as McCarthy and K&R and the guys (and occasionally the women) who invented coding in the 60s and 70s. Most of them have been forgotten, but many of them had phenomenal skills - the kind of people who would work for a couple of months on a project, type in all the code on a single day, and have it work perfectly first time. Or who would sketch out a fully functional timesharing OS for a new hardware architecture over a weekend and have it finished and working a couple of months later. Or the small team at Xerox PARC led by Charles Thacker who decided to clone an entire DEC PDP-10 mainframe as a side project, because management wouldn't let them buy one and they wanted something nicer to code on.