In my opinion you only get market rates if you can produce market value, and this heavily depends on the ecosystem you have to build things on. For example, on

In my opinion you only get market rates if you can produce market value, and this heavily depends on the ecosystem you have to build things on. For example, one can created huge value working at Netflix and Netflix pays top dollar for this. However, the value the engineer produces depends on the number of subscribers Netflix has, the content that they are able to provide, and the infrastructure to stream high quality videos. The same engineer cannot produce the same market value if this person works by themselves in a start up. At the early stages it makes sense therefore to pay the rate that keeps the engineer productive, because the value they produce at early times is zero.