[mdale]

Professional sports salaries benefits from a game with well defined rules winners and losers systems of measurement around scoring points.

A company has a bunch of other stuff that had to be in solid alignment to "win". Engineers have to be working on the correct problems to begin with to add exponentially more value.

It's not as simple as "crushing" the sprint points assigned rather chosing the problem set ... If chosing the problem set then it's leadership or founders which can be rewarded at 50x.

[jrumbut]

It can still be difficult to tease out how much of any win is due to a single player, I think maybe the key difference is that the games are played in public and only one team can win a game.

So I, as a team owner, can watch Strasbourg pitch, see him nullify my lineup, then I have almost all the information I need to know he really is a lot better than average.

Additionally, by being willing to pay more and getting him on my team I'm depriving my opponents of his talent.

There is no direct analogue in programming, besides maybe open source projects.

[legulere]

In sports in a game the better team will win and the worse team will lose. In economy the better company will win and the worse company will also win, just a little bit less.

[knowtheworld]

The difference is a sports team has at most 30 team members but a company can have 1000+ engineers, which makes everything tangled together

[Exmoor]

Or the better team lose by a lot, but catch up slightly over time to the worse team because the worse team was better 20 years ago.