Sports teams may be a very poor example because they’re similar to movie stars - the workers are _also_ the sales folks in those labor markets. Not a lot of engineers have the kind of influence to bring entire swaths of investment and interest besides celebrity engineers basically. If we look at it from this lens Big Tech is what it is partly because we don’t have anything like a draft to help ensure fairness of access to highly skilled labor that is a massive influence upon the success of the organization.
There’s nothing like SAG to help mere mortal engineers that struggle with ageism and have trouble breaking into more lucrative companies for whatever reasons either.
But unlike sports we can’t really distill down everything an engineer does these days into a line item sheet of statistics because so much of engineering isn’t execution-focused but design and project focus.
Also, I’ve realized that a ton of software companies - arguably the majority - basically exist to take existing proprietary business knowledge that engineers have little clue or concern about and put it online essentially. Technology in itself isn’t the competitive differentiator at all for these companies that is as opposed to more trade-like relationships, business know-how, etc. that basically acts as social mediation for a lot of incumbent wealthy people’s whims. These would be a lot of enterprise software companies where your sales team basically buys you access to certain accounts and unlocks markets.
So this to me is the difference between a company that makes money because of its technology advantages like most of Big Tech rather than existing business domain and market influence advantages (I think this is really close to the classic rent term and in the technology area all that raw data could be considered rent maybe).