> football player style contracts for engineers, where you are tied in to a team for N years, and with a requirement that another team has to pay big money for your contract if they want you to transfer?

i.e. golden handcuff equity grants with vesting schedules? Top performers in highly demanded areas can have some or all of their remaining equity bought out.

It definitely ties the value of the contract to the stock price. In a way the company is leveraging its stock - significant declines hurt talent retention, and significant gains help it.

That’s different. You are talking about doing a deal with the player.

I’m talking about Company X having to pay off Cloudflare-the-business if they want Team Cloudflare’s top network engineer to transfer to Team Company X, mid contract.

That only really works in professional sports because each team is part of a league which enforces operating rules, including rules about player contracts and trades. No such "league" exists in the tech industry, and any attempt to form one would likely be a criminal violation of antitrust laws.

Gosh. Are sports stars really so different as employees? I suppose they get paid so much specifically to endure such odd employment circumstances.

Sounds like servitude or serfs? Elite sport is one thing but for mere mortals I guess it would become extremely abusive.

There are only about 1700 NFL players total at any given time. Most of those guys have amazing natural talent, honed by 10+ years of intense training that would crush most of us.

Network engineers are comparatively far more expendable and easily replaceable. It's not nearly as hard to learn as NFL level football.

Maybe. The best engineers are also naturally talented. It is a fact that to be a good engineer you need to be very smart. You can get by with just a CS degree and a Cisco certificate, but you won’t be a game changer.

How many Principle Engineers are there at the FAANGs? How important are they to the business, and how long did it take them to get to that level, in their careers?

I am not convinced that there is any natural talent involved in being a good network engineer.

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2002/07/22/the-talent-myth

Now add football (soccer), basketball, baseball, hockey, volleyball, and we're at probably tens-hundreds of thousands of professional athletes with multi-year contracts.