The problem is that there are at least 5 or 6 different parts of your original comment that are completely lacking in context / elaboration, so that readers are

The problem is that there are at least 5 or 6 different parts of your original comment that are completely lacking in context / elaboration, so that readers are left guessing about what you are trying to say. I don’t know what “their setup”, “making their toolchain and business processes work”, “the stackoverflow setup”, etc. mean, or what I am supposed to be comparing. If you can quantify, e.g. “they spent 16 man-years working on a development process that saves no more than two weeks for each new project, and they only have a few dozen projects to use it on”, then I would have a much clearer idea of the scope, even if I still didn’t know what this process was. On the flip side, if this new process makes the difference between a high-impact future project succeeding vs. failing or getting started vs. never getting tried, it might still be worth it. * * * At a higher level, having people spend some amount of their professional time on public-facing work that helps more than themselves or their local organization isn’t necessarily such a terrible thing. If many organizations and individuals spend time volunteering their time to larger-scale open projects, it can end up as a multiplier for everyone’s effort. All modern software projects (not to mention every other type of project) are built on millions of man-years of effort by huge numbers of people, most of whom didn’t recover much if any of the value they created.