This is the answer.
453 karma · joined March 25, 2022
...freudian typo...
I was a software engineering manager at a lean, high-margin, profitable start-up based in the NYC area starting in the late 2000s. We were acquired in 2014 by a very typical (for the time) SV-based competitor that had raised hundreds of millions in an IPO a few years earlier. Our acquirers had yet to see a single quarter of profit, of course.
I and my team had so many good laughs at the attitudes of our CA counterparts. One especially strong memory is when, a week after a particularly dismal quarterly earnings report, a junior engineer based in the HQ of our new corporate overlords sent out a team-wide email complaining about the corporate decision to no longer stock the refrigerators with free fresh blueberries. They bemoaned the lack of respect for the "talent," and tossed in gratis the ubiquitous pseudo-threat "if you don't treat us right, we can always go down the road to an employer who will."
On visits to HQ in Redwood City, I marveled at the paradisaical campus-like setting (several buildings around a "quad," with parks, a tennis court, swimming pool, gyms, etc. etc.) and noted the amount of time the local staff spent taking advantage of these amenities. I remember the engineers on my team from HQ explaining to me that my proposed stand-up meeting schedule wouldn't work beacuse their intramural basketball league scheduled their games for that time. Meanwhile, in our low-perqs atmosphere in NY, distractions were limited and productivity was high. We also all made money.
Since that was Silicon Valley during one of the many gold rushes, I thought that I must have been "missing something." What seemed like common sense to me was clearly heresy to the golden people there. The explanation I arrived at was that such perqs were the necessary counterpart to an expectation that your employees have no life other than work.
I came to realize I wasn't missing anything, they were. That company did end up burning through their cash stockpile, and had to sell a few years later for less than 1/4 of what they paid to acquire us.
These days, the only time I drop into SO is when a "how do you do that again?" search yields a relevant-looking question asked within the last year or so. As often as not, the search leads me to a blog post or primary source (e.g. mozilla javascript documentation). But when I do make it to SO, I find that it's still a bustling community full of legitimate expert guidance.
But since the total lifetime spend on a house is absolutely lower if the interest rate over the life of the loan is lower, then it's true that lower interest rates make homes cheaper over their lifetimes. I don't understand why the writer of this article would chose to focus on the deceptive monthly payment argument rather than the concrete interest-rate argument.
This is certainly not true of the Christianity that I've been witness to all my life. In those circles, doubt is a given - an intrinsic component of the inquisitive human mind - and doubt is basically the core of all faith. If there's no room for doubt, there's no room for faith.
Many people seem to forget that there are no free lunches... anyone who has ever wrestled with the learning curve of a necessarily proprietary no-code solution knows that you don't usually save time or money by outsourcing your platform, and that by outsourcing, you can easily become indentured to a restrictive black-box environment you don't control.
If you're not dealing with critical security updates to your Mattermost install, you will be dealing with something equally time-consuming and fundamental, like managing CloudFormation templates or trying to get divs to nest correctly in a WebFlow one-pager.
If your startup doesn't have the in-house knowledge/intelligence to be able to run a stack like the OP's, you might ask yourself how you plan to create a successful software company without any in-house software competency.