Think about how startups work today. Rather than leasing a commercial office at half the price, they pay exorbitant premiums for WeWork. Nobody does proper capacity planning on AWS (let alone physical infrastructure), everyone only hires the most senior people, everyone pays exorbitant premiums to recruiters rather than building inbound candidate flow.
It's incredible how far we've pushed the time premium for money. I'm honestly not sure whether it's rational or not. But I think there are two good lessons from this.
#1: Patience is a massive advantage if you can pull it off. You can get out of the environment that's pushing senior level dev salaries to 200k or higher, pay less for everything, etc.
#2: There is good money in selling time to financed startups. If you can do anything that would conceivably let young, cash-rich startups trade time for money, that's a business.
*Network effects are unfortunately only understood as a handwavey buzzphrase in tech, but they have been researched and defined in extreme detail by economists. Think non-ergodic math.
perhaps for a reason, civilization has something to do with cities
It's seems absurd in this day and age that we're still concentrating business to such an extent in places like the NY Metro Area and the Bay Area. IBM in the olden times leveraged locating facilities in nowheresville as a competitive advantage. I'm surprised it isn't catching on now that engineers are being so highly compensated.