Is it? When you're inside the fence you get some IT cast off from the last guy that was cleaned up and re-spywared from 2-3y ago (sometimes worse!). As a hired gun (data science/engineer), I have an m3 128gb 1tb all sliders to the right MacBook Pro that works great, no spyware, rocket fast, trains/runs small models. With Apple 0%, paid in a year. I generally can name my price so it pays for itself.
If you're riding it every day, every little speed up counts. I don't wait on GitHub actions or external systems for my crunching. For that I have my local slurm cluster of mini PCs, 64 cpus and counting!
I assure you there is a better world outside of the fence, I am unlikely to return.
Not really sure what you're getting at there, I was a hired gun for about a year, founded a company and am having a great time.
Last time I was at a corporate gig, I got a 2+ year old base model MacBook Pro to do a data science. 16gb of ram is fun and all, but when you're using R you're going to have a bad time.
During my hired gun period I worked with two organizations that used gitlab, and they're doing just fine. One place I had no problem using their cloud for bigger runs, the other had a permission system that was pissing me off so I solved my own problem and billed them enough it didn't matter anyhow. Like I said, having extra cpus for big R runs you don't have to ask anyone for has a value all its own.
If you're riding it every day, every little speed up counts. I don't wait on GitHub actions or external systems for my crunching. For that I have my local slurm cluster of mini PCs, 64 cpus and counting!
I assure you there is a better world outside of the fence, I am unlikely to return.