At my first pro job in 1995 I had a coworker who was a consultant for the company’s Cyborg system. Cyborg was an obscure database/programming environment (so obscure that I’ve never been able to find any online reference to it) that dated from the 1970s and only a few companies by that time still used it, and my coworker was possibly the last person in the world who could still work with it. Everything that he did took just a few minutes to code but then hours (and sometimes days) to compile, so he mostly just sat around doing nothing, for $300 an hour (in 1995 dollars, no less). Eventually he convinced the company to let him work from home (with dialup Internet!), and he ended up getting two more remote gigs like this with other companies simultaneously. So he was making $900 an hour for easily less than an hour of real work each day.

Meanwhile I was coding in Visual Basic 3 and imagining a day far in the future when I would be the last VB programmer on Earth, raking in thousands of dollars a day doing nothing. It of course has not turned out that way …