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Comment by eloisant | Hacker News Reader

Correct - and if you compare world record marathon runners with average (but seasoned) marathon runners, the difference is even smaller.

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Specifically, RunningWorld.com took data from 107.9M runners over 70,000 events over 209 countries over 32 years and found the "average" finish time was about 4:32hrs. The men's world record is ~2 hours.

https://www.runnersworld.com/uk/training/marathon/a27787958/...

(That link has a video of people on a giant treadmill, moving at Kipchogi's world record pace, trying to keep up).

Time wise, absolutely true, but as someone who is a reasonably seasoned runner I can say my 3:30 marathon feels lightyears away from 2:00. It doesn't sound 10x harder, it sounds impossibly harder.

so in the context of TFA, what really needs to be asked is not "are some people massively better coders than others?", but rather "how difficult is it to progress from the equivalent of a 3:30 marathoner to a 2:00, as a coder?"

I don't know the answer, TBH. I've been a programmer for nearly 35 years now, and at times along that journey I've been the 10x coder. But I'm not anymore (just like I can't go sub-3h for a marathon at this point), despite knowing a lot more and being better by some metrics than I was during my 10x periods.

Maybe what needs to be asked is

"If you're okay with the message getting there in 3 and a half hours instead of 2 hours, do we really need to fetishize 10x performance?"

YAGNI is a way stronger principle to base your success on than finding or training unicorns.

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