I am not sure that going to a site calling itself "Hacker" News and writing such a comment is not blatant trolling. Or maybe this is a sad side effect of developers using Macs.
I am useless at building things and I built a PC that has never given me problems. I even bought the wrong case!
The fix for some kind of weird power issue is to roughly calculate what kind of power you need and buy a decent power supply -- it will probably be better than the commercial grade desktop and give some headroom for future upgrades.
That depends on how much you value the learning-opportunity provided by building your own machine. I certainly do!
> It's better to buy a commercial business grade desktop with a support contract.
If you're a self-employed SWE who needs a reliable dependable backup machine that you can use the support-contract to get fixed within 24 hours, then yes, I strongly agree.
...but I still think building ones' own primary machine is worth it.
> They always have some kind of weird power issue or something
I've built 8 machines for myself (and a couple more for friends and family) since I started in 2004 and I've never had an issue with power-supplies because I thoroughly research my options. PSUs are a safety-critical component of your PC: if it misbehaves it could kill you (e.g. if the computer-case goes live or the grounding pin fails - fun!) - or at least destroy everything of value inside it - I guess because I refuse to cheap-out on PSUs I've never had a problem.
Actually - there was one incident: back in 2005 I was building my second machine (a box to run Windows Server 2003 on so I could do ASP.NET web-development without needing to install IIS and SQL Server on my XP machine) and the PSU I ordered online was delayed, so I went to my parents' town's small-biz local PC shop and asked if they had any PSUs and all they had was a second-hand jobbie they gave me in a plastic carrier-bag for £20 - that PSU failed after a few days - just in-time for my online-order PSU to arrive.
I would "build" your PC in PC Part Picker and see what it says.
Intel/AMD: You may have a low wattage/efficiency PSU (multiply box wattage by efficiency and compare to what PC Part Picker says you need), and those are relatively cheap to replace. Your friend may have overclocked the CPU without a full stability test, that's simply a visit to the BIOS to disable.
AMD: You may have poorly installed cooling. AMD can have more problems with overheating than Intel.
I finally bought a Dell Precision 5810 and it blew my mind how professional the entire case was. Every single little thing had a dust guard, or a clip, or a wire holder or its own little cooling fan. The graphics cards had support brackets. The hard drive bays had these fantastic multi-fit caddies, and the SATA cables were all the perfect length. Windows registered itself from the e-mark on the BIOS each time I reinstalled it, which was really handy, and each time I installed Windows from scratch everything automagically seemed to work and I didn't have to go digging around for drivers. The onboard RAID controller seemed to 'just work' and took like 3 seconds to setup.
I bought my Dell Precision 5810 second-hand, and it would have been cheaper than building the same computer with a custom case from individually sourced second hand parts.
At the moment there are 20+ DELL precision workstations on Gumtree in just my local suburb.