[Thiez]

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.