From a business standpoint I’ve noticed these two mindsets prevail:

With paid SaaS, there’s always somebody to blame for missing features or outages. From my POV either way the IT department is getting blamed if a system goes down, and the overconfidence in the vendor to fix all issues timely is not always realistic.

Business leaders have conditioned themselves to being sold something. With open source they still expect a CEO or some figurehead to give a presentation on how the free tool will benefit the company, even though it doesn’t make sense when there’s no incentive to sell.

I started learning how to program when I asked myself how I could setup one web page template and include the content instead of copying the menus and logos on every page. Most people will never be observant enough to consider this might be how most big websites function, or how/why they would develop anything. There’s a tall gate that some people just walk right over.

At 5pm somebody once added an email that had an auto responder to a distribution list that was used in a lot of places. As I’m eating my dinner my phone is getting blown up because everything is suddenly getting spammed with delivery failures because the auto responder was getting blocked from blasting everybody on the distribution list. I was like, I’m sorry you’ve fabricated an urgent situation after hours but I’m gonna eat my chicken now.

Shoot and I thought my 30 second SQL queries were a problem

They come with a name from the shelter and they tell us we’re not allowed to change it (even though they did!) so we always just kept whatever the shelter picked