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.
