Not really, professional sports salaries often work the same way- teams who have a superstar can't afford to have the star play for the competition even if they could win without the star playing for their team.
A team won't pay a player just to keep them from going to their division rival or whatnot, it's a nice fairy tail for the ESPN talking heads to keep repeating and it generates a nice bit of juicy controversy, but it just isn't a thing.
Besides it doesn't pass the smell test. If you don't value the player or you think your chances of winning are better by spending that money elsewhere, why would it be a net benefit to your team to keep a player you don't want to pay just to stop him from going to another team? Do you think the Dallas Cowboys are really thinking to themselves "Man, we don't really value RBs like that, but we really got to stop Zeke from going to the Eagles"? Nonsense!
Likewise if Google really doesn't want an employee going somewhere else to put a damper on their dominance, if it really was the goal of that employee to prevent Google's dominance, don't you think there are infinitely many other avenues that person could take? If you are paying for the knowledge, what is to stop this individual from creating a pseudonym and committing to an open source AI library on a separate laptop on their free time? The answer is nothing, and in fact that happens all the time, or the employee is busy creating their side business unbeknownst to the company, leaves, and waits out their non-compete.
It's a silly conspiracy to think smart people will willfully stand by getting paid to do busy work and not pick up on what's really going on, and it doesn't make sense.
For one, the fact that this would break their work contracts. And I'm pretty sure Google can afford better lawyers that the average dev (even a well paid one).
It just doesn't make sense to waste your cap space on a player you don't actually want to play. If you sign someone, you want to integrate them into your gameplan or at least warm the bench. And if they're a benchwarmer, you weren't signing them just to prevent others from doing so.
Look at how the Patriots succeed, for example. On paper, they are nowhere near the best NFL team. But they contend for championships almost every year.
The only example I can think of recently is Kimi Raikkonen in F1. Ferrari paid him his usual salary after removing him from the first team (each team in F1 only has two seats, then sometimes there is a reserve and an additional test driver role, mostly for the simulator). The agreement was they would continue to pay him his regular F1 driver salary, as long as he didn't race for any other F1 team.
He spent a year doing rally, did a couple of NASCAR races, snowmobile, motocross, and came back the following year for Renault.
Funnily enough, a few years later he returned as a first team driver for Ferrari for a few additional years and now races for Alfa Romeo.
His main thing is he hates promotional appearances (stuff like commercials and autograph signings) and restrictions (he has a private motocross track and shop, and he refuses to race for any team that won't let him ride motorcycles and snowmobiles and whatever the F else he wants to do).
Tell that to Billy Beane, general manager of the Oakland A's, who used statistical analysis and team interaction models (i.e. "equations") to turn propel the team into the top ranks with salary expenses of only 1/3th of the other top teams. The story was described in the book Moneyball and dramatized in the film of the same name.
That's basically what early Michael Lewis books were about: exploiting market inefficiencies.
(Agree with your larger point about sports, however.)
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