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0 pointsdragonwriter3y ago0 comments

> 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-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.usatoday.com/story/sports/mlb/2021/04/16/ap-stud...

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.

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Thiez3y 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.

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