This was my idea. I am a developer in my company. We are a flat structure. We have a lot of respect for each other. I am on a standup with the CEO every day. We all believe in our product and would happily participate in whatever activity brings it to market more quickly. We do not hire or retain the kind of talent that would flatly refuse to participate in experimental projects like this. At least not without some sort of initial conversation about why it's not a good fit for a particular individual.
I certainly see how someone might share your perspective. I used to work for a souless megacorp and I could have easily found myself telling my former employer to "go fuck themselves" if a proposal similar to this was imposed upon me.
A 42u rack and 1 Gbps connection is $400 per month.
Put cheap supermicro EPYC servers in rather than threadrippers (or build your own). High capacity RDIMMs are cheaper than UDIMMs.
This will give you a much more maintainable solution than workstations at employee's home via overlay VPN.
There is a maintenance cost for infrastructure that people tend to forget these days.
I later learned that the CTO had to spend a couple hours talking him out of firing me. I probably should've just quit on the spot anyway.
It's noisy, it takes up space, and presumably I'm on call to fix it if it breaks.
You should pay them an extra 24x(PSU wattage)x(peak $/Wh in area) per day for the electricity too.
I'm alarmed that someone in your company felt this idea was appropriate enough to propose.