This is only applicable if they can actually sell very small increments of their time for that amount of money, which I strongly suspect they can't. There have

This is only applicable if they can actually sell very small increments of their time for that amount of money, which I strongly suspect they can't. There have been numerous threads here on HN about the difficulties of finding full-price work that isn't full time. Even then, the $2k difference between the cheapest pre-built the article references and the DIY version would be 20 hours at $100/hr. Half a workweek to build one PC seems excessive.