I disagree with the direction gp is taking, big projects involving money and people are not easy. On the other hand your example might support his argument.

You've drawn attention to an Airbnb engineer with a bunch of other interests that don't seem directly related to the infrastructure behind the company. I'm sure they use these things, but they aren't going to be critical to the success or failure of the site. That suggests the technical challenges of Airbnb aren't enough to keep someone with a large amount of maturity, drive and focus busy and interested.

That's totally possible but if you're the CTO of Airbnb would you want the high schooler for cheap (who may be unreliable when it comes to managing schedules, following protocols, having the maturity to deal with failing systems) or do you want the guy who's been managing all of these OS products for years? It's a person issue, not really a competency issue.

nit: `n` is way better than `nvm`

+1 to n for the homebrew installation. nvm team is notoriously hardheaded about not wanting to maintain availability through different tools.