Fundamentally, tech workers don’t seem to understand this point mainly because they are making more money than “everyone else.”
The other reason is that we as humans don’t understand big numbers. Big ape brains can’t understand the gap between $1 million and $1 billion let alone 100 billion.
If software engineers would have banded together a long time ago to get a larger piece of the pie like professional athletes, then….
- Senior engineers would make NFL wages
- And quants would be making NBA/NFL wages
That is an absurd exaggeration, unless by "senior engineers" you are including people who do a lot more than "just" engineering, e.g. build companies, build products, etc.
The reason NFL wages are so high is not just that they bring in a lot of money, it's that the players are to a large extent irreplaceable. If you take the, say, 500 most talented players in the US at a given time, you can't just replace them with the next 500 most talented players and get the same outcome. So each of them commands a very large salary - because the alternatives are worse, and will lead to worse outcomes, which will lead to less money for the team.
And at the top end, the best players are a massive draw that makes teams tons of money.
Compare that to engineers. We are, to a much larger extent, replaceable. If Amazon can't hire the 1000 "best" engineers, going to the next 1000 will probably not noticeably impact their product. I'm not denying that there are talent differentials between engineers - I think it's even more than the commonly cited 10x. But it's still not that big, definitely not bigger than the difference in NFL players (since engineering is not competitive.)
Note that if you stretch the definition of software engineer to include people building and launching brand new products, building huge successful teams, etc, then you're getting into the realm of CTOs, CEOs, founders, etc, which are far less replaceable (I'm a good engineer, but I couldn't have built Stripe). But then we're talking about the people who are adequately compensated for their work.
I genuinely believe that a league made of the 500-1000 rank players would be just as (or at least almost as) entertaining as one with the top 500 players. Relative rank is what matters and it's why NCAA March Madness is so popular despite being made up of relatively low ranked players.
This is a popular enough theory that it's been tested multiple times. In the successful cases, the rival league still ended up trying to poach the top players and ended up merging with the other top league. In the less successful cases, the league went out of business.
In software, that's not the way it works. Or at least, the competitive business aspect of it is largely out of engineer's hands. Few businesses ultimately succeed because they wrote better code, IMO. Though interestingly, a bunch of startups only get big in the first place by having great code that allows them great speed/flexibility/etc. Stripe itself got big originally because its API was really great, which I'd attribute more to product than to engineers, except in this case it's kind of a merger of the two.
"March Madness" is an anomaly, a single-elimination tournament with 48 games in one weekend with a history of upsets and buzzer-beaters. Additionally, college basketball and football in the US benefit greatly from the local and alumni network affinity for the programs, that doesn't exist with, say, minor league baseball or the NBA D-League.
The AFL was actually relatively successful since it forced a merger with the NFL. Meanwhile, at least according to a 30 for 30 documentary, the original USFL had a potentially viable niche as a second-tier spring league for awhile until they made the bizarre decision to switch to the fall football season and try to force an NFL merger.
What is so special about them?
...because they formed unions.
I don't understand what makes people think that software engineers are so valuable that they'd get wages that are multiples of doctors.
The Logic of Collective Action explains the mechanics. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Logic_of_Collective_Action
It's basically game theory, by another name.
"Preventing defectors from collective bargaining" is also, more or less, the definition of what an economic cartel does.
If you could hire 2 or 5 of the next best engineers for the price of a top pick 'NFL' engineer, you'd be ahead in output in most situations.
The same does not go for the NFL.
This is the main reason it’s completely illogical to expect that an employee receive most of the revenue their labor helped generate.
If your work earns $100k/y in revenue for a company, that doesn't mean your work created it entirely. The continued dividends of organization of the company, customer acquisition, legal apparatus, support of your entire organization made that revenue possible and are entitled to a share of it too. It took a village to make that revenue, unless it didn't, in which case: quit and do it yourself to keep all that money.
This is a self-correcting system that ensures everyone gets paid approximately what they contributed.
It's of course hard to precisely quantify these things, but the worsening gap between worker and owner incomes is quite obviously not proportional to any change in how much value owners add to a corporation compared to workers (if anything, workers' contribution has been increasing, not decreasing, as productivity tools and techniques have been advancing).
It's because there ARE contributions from the owner, even a passive owner has what I called "dividends from stored labor": they took on the risk, created a functioning company solving a problem, did the work of organizing the systems/structure that run the thing, and so they are entitled to a piece of the revenue as well (as that revenue couldn't have been earned without their contributions either).
My point was that owners currently get a disproportionately large piece, and that the gap between what owners get vs what workers get has been widening with time. And not only is it widening, but it is doing so while the relative contributions to the business' success are often narrowing (give the huge increases in worker productivity in most domains).
What's happening here is gains from trade. I have a lot of free time and a set of skills, while my employer has a lot of money and the willingness to shoulder the risk that the work they're asking me to do won't be profitable for them in the long run. Both sides get something out of the deal.