I "believe" in 10x programmers. But sports is generally a poor analogy. You don't have anyone running 10x faster than the average running speed for example...
My mind goes to the Walter Peytons and the Michael Jordans and Tiger Woodses and the Serena Williamses, and so on. People who were so far ahead of the average -- even in a professional sport -- that they changed the nature of the game for everyone who has come after. It's not about pure score; it's about total performance.
You've got guys scoring 10x the points of other people though?
The reason it's awkward in sports is sports are head on competitive. Put a crappy team in a match with a good one and it's 10x. Two teams of equal skill don't seem like there is a lopsided talent.
Lets say that person A can reason about 1.5x more complex problems than his peers. His peers will be productive and contribute a lot of code until the codebase reaches their complexity limit, and then they start to really struggle. Lets say that A then comes onto that team at that moment, to A there is still plenty of room left before the project is beyond him, so he can work full speed as normal. In this situation A would probably contribute 10x more than anyone else on the team, not because he is 10x better but because he is still over that threshold.
> You've got guys scoring 10x the points of other people though?
Not 10x more than the median, I don't think.
(Happy to be proved wrong with a link to a player scoring 10x more than the median scorer[1]).
[1] In some games, like soccer, for example, it makes no sense to compare goals between strikers and goalies - goalies aren't expected to score, and so they almost never do.
Of course you're right about apples-to-apples but a guy like CR7 has scored quite a lot more goals than your average striker, surely? Keep in mind he also has had a longer career with more games, due to being really good. It's hard to say who is median because the not-top guys don't get that many games before they get sold to a lower standard team, or just benched.
Isn't it normal in basketball to have one guy dominating the points?
I think a better analogy would be e.g. scientists. I believe that there are certainly physicists who produce 10 times as much research output compared to the median.
But the real differentiator is in (both programming and science) the depth and quality, not quantity.
