To paraphrase the first item in the HN guidelines:
"anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."[0]
You can get to explore configurations and scenarios you might never be able to do at work. But it's not about work, it's about scratching an itch.
> The most egregious factor of this hobby is that you are often buying equipment that costs enterprise prices
If you know where to look you can pick up enterprisey kit cheap. It may not be the latest and greatest, but it's probably good enough to play with.
Just because you don't understand the attraction of this pastime (or any pastime) you don't get to judge or complain about folks who enjoy tinkering.
Once upon a time I built out a home lab to run a piece of software called Zebra to learn about BGP4 and CIDR. It was about scratching an itch. If energy prices in the UK weren't so utterly bonkers at the moment then I'd love to build out a new lab to mess about with some stuff. Again, to scratch a curiosity itch.
I have a home ESXi server which I use to host all my own stuff. I don't consider that a lab as such. It's just my home production infrastructure.
And then I have another ESXi which hosts the stuff I'm testing for work, and only work.
In my work home lab I have full access which I don't do even in the testing environment at work due to fragmentation of responsibilities. Or if I do I step on people's toes when trying stuff out that belongs to their realm. Most things are interconnected so testing something at work usually gets slowed down by the need to involve other people who don't always have time or interest. That's where my own lab comes in.
It's also a lot faster due to not needing VPN and having to deal with servers halfway across the world. And not having to deal with the evil SSL-MITM Internet proxy at work saves me SO much time.. Of course that work needs to be done to put it in production but a lot of stuff never makes it to that stage and then figuring how to smooth things with the proxy is just wasted effort.
These days, the nomenclature survives, but the facilities are often virtualized or remote eg https://learningnetworkstore.cisco.com/cisco-learning-labs
Thats quite a lot of people, personally i would rather be planting trees, it i could pay the bill with that
I built mine in 2018 and I paid $65 each for two E5 2670 v3 ($1600 MSRP, 2014 CPU), and $300 for a dual socket motherboard with 128GB of ram. Yeah it's not the latest and greatest but it's been going strong since then.
I could say the exact same thing about however you decide to spend your weekends.
I don't really know if I qualify though. All that's on a 2011 Dell, a 2-bay Synology nas, and a UPS I found on Amazon. I have zero urge to go out and buy a rack; it works great as is.
And learning also fits into this: like the computer version of a school chemistry laboratory. Setting up computers to perform tests for certification.
For what it's worth I agree with you about the equipment -but I read on reddit a lot of /r/homelabbers getting equipment for work so that would make sense.
I don't work in the field so for me personally it's more a question of wanting to experiment with software while not throwing away perfectly working (but old) computers.
I'm not sure what the difference is between this and any other moderately expensive hobby.
As far as the name, I think it comes from the term "networking lab" that netops actually use to trial out network topologies before deploying them in the field. It's a home networking lab, that's all.
:)