What's obvious about that? I can pretty well guarantee the existence of golfers who need 10x the strokes of professional golfers. I can definitely guarantee the existence of people who can't manage 10% of the running speed of a gold medal sprinter.
The 10x programmer idea also applies to adults working as programmers. If you were to limit the runners to an analogous population (runners, I guess, or even healthy adults), I'd definitely take that bet.
[0] His peak speed was a bit faster (~27 mph), but the point stands...
Most people could beat a par 3 in less than 30 strokes given 1 week of exposure to golf.
> I've always heard this is the Netflix model.
Also, Valve. By some accounts, this creates terrible working environment, where people are competing instead of cooperating. Not to mention it distorts the incentives, as devs are heavily incentivised to project an image of being impactful high-achiever (as oposed to actually just being one, and not having to manage one's image). Of course, it also happens in regular companies, but here higher stakes make the game more vicious.
I've always heard this is the Netflix model.
> difference between developer salaries at any company varies by maybe 50%, whereas the productivity varies by at least a full order of magnitude.
I like your thought process but do you really believe this is possible? There are few fields where you can observe order of magnitude differences in salary. As you said, human nature seems to reject this, likely because it does not really occur in the wild. Even in sports it is rare for a particular position to have pay disparity to that degree.