I’m deliberately avoiding identifying my industry, but this exists in every industry.
I can be flippant and say “we’re not making a web shopping cart here” to my people, but the top engineers making Amazon’s shopping cart must deal with a lot of complicated problems.
Do I even need to list things? Think of something that’s difficult. Nuclear bombs, medical devices, jet engines, skyscrapers, semiconductors, guided missiles. I could go on and on, but I’d still have to explain to you about the more mundane things like operations research.
Hah!
No. The median engineer cannot, say, design anything to do with a tokamak fusion reactor. Even the ones that work at places that build tokamaks. At least the hard stuff, that’s why they’re in supporting roles.
The people that do those types of things are very, very special.
As for 10x’ers. This is a standard term. It’s used everywhere.
Easy proof that they exist is that lots of people are taking on multiple “full time” jobs. Like 4-5.
Those are at least 4x’ers. They’re just pretending to be 1x’ers for the salary bump.
And of course, 10 x’ers don’t get 10 times the salary. Double would be pushing it.
I’ll speak from my experience in engineering.
It is extremely difficult to find experts. There are just not that many people around who are both smart and knowledgeable enough to solve high end engineering problems. This is why the vast majority of complex problems are solved by very few people, with the rest existing to support them.
10x’ers are real. Except it’s worse than that. The tip top can solve problems the median person will never be able to.
Second, like everything, expertise exists on a continuum. Since the best of the best are radically more talented than the median (who you could still even call experts) or even the 90th percentile, you want the top ones.
It’s just very hard to tell them apart in an interview. You can try the standard interview questions, but that’s not very discriminatory.
Lots of people don’t fly.
A few trips ago, I sat next to a guy in his 50s on his first ever flight.
He was so excited. More so than my 4 yo was on his first trip.
I had to teach him how to put his seat back and told him he can keep the headphones and how they used to have these tube headphones and what it was like before 9/11.
Alternative point:
Conscription is not about fighting for your country. It’s about ensuring that the children of the wealthy and powerful would die alongside the children of the poor in any conflict. War has always been fought by the poor and powerless to benefit the wealthy and powerful.
You then have a trained, but effectively civilian, group selected from the entire cross section of your country that shares the diversity of all your people and which you can use for all kinds of positive change, like building projects and disaster preparedness and relief.
This is a very different group than career soldiers.
This needs to be thought of as another two years of high school with different curricula rather than raising some kind of militia.
You didn’t have experts. You had people who convinced you that they were experts.
Same thing happened to me. Their (obvious when it was pointed out to me later) failure cost me a lot of money.