u/HnBKappaCamo

Hey guys,

I was at the office one of my clients today and noticed they're still maintaining their own rack with a couple of 1U nodes. It's a pretty small dev team, so i was surprised they haven't just moved everything to a virtual environment yet

I've mostly been a VM guy lately, i usually just spin up what i need on serverspace or vultr and call it a day because I'm paranoid about hardware failure. But seeing their setup made me wonder if I'm missing out on the performance side of things

For those of you still running bare metal: is it mostly about the raw power and control over the hypervisor, or is their a specific peace of mind that comes with owning the physical iron in 2026?

I'm curious if it's worth the hassle of dealing with physical maintenance and parts of a small setup, or if the performance gape is really that noticeable compared to managed infrastructure, what's the main reason you guys still prefer to rack your own gear?

But SWEs get to have Leet͏code, clear progression, objective right/wrong answers. While we havevibes.

I just went through 8 months of PM interviewing

**SWEs have:**

* Leetcode Pre͏mium ($35/month)

* AlgoE͏xpert, Blind 75, Neet͏code

* Clear difficulty progression

* Tons of fr͏ee resources

* Mock platforms like Pramp

**We don't have anything.** When SWEs fail interviews, they know what to study. Failed a tree problem? Study trees. Failed system design? Study system design.

When PMs fail: "Not the right fit" or "Strong candidate but not quite there"

Cool. What do I improve? Everything? Nothing? Nobody fucking knows.