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Comment by 31reasons | Hacker News Reader

We humans are greedy species. If given opportunity we would always hire superstar (even janitors or hamburger flippers) especially if they don't cost any extra. If you can find superstar, great! but stop crying "shortage" if you are not in the business of open heart surgery.

EDIT: And yes every average heart surgeon is capable of doing heart surgery otherwise they would not get a degree in the first place. There is no such thing as 10x heart surgeon.

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heart surgery is very complex and success depends on a lot of things. How a human body will react to a highly invasive procedure is unknown hence if it reacts in a way that your average surgeon has no idea on how to deal with the patient would die. Have you heard of specialists? Do you know why people go to specialists? Why is there a need of specialists if every average heart surgeon can do heart surgery?

So you see there is something like a 10X heart surgeon, he/she is called a specialist.

There is a difference between a specialist and a 10X person. Specialization indicates a detailed knowledge of specialized subject. It has nothing to do with how creative, intelligent and talented you are in solving problems of your domain. I could be specialized into writing device drivers for Real-time linux systems and yet be average programmer. Specialization has to do with knowledge, 10x indicates fluid intelligence in solving problems.

Then I guess we differed on what 10x meant.

This what generally people think of 10x. The imaginative 10x heart surgeon would do following:(any or all of it)

1. Take 10 times less time performing heart surgery.

2. Could perform successful surgery at 10 times less cost.

3. Invent new ways of doing work of 10 heart surgeons.

4. Survival rate of his/her patients would be 10 times that of other heart surgeons.

5. Could perform heart surgery so complicated that it would generally require 10 heart surgeons during the surgery.

Are you going to find such a heart surgeon ? If so, how many? would entire healthcare system be functional if all hospitals are adamant on just hiring 10x surgeon and at the same time advocating bringing more 1x heart surgeons into the market.

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