Skilled laborers cost money not for what they're doing for you, but for the years and sweat they put into knowing safety practices, codes, and proper workmanship.
Exactly. And in this case, the physical product was to be housing. We have building codes for a reason...
Home owners who aren’t experts should be able to build their own house.
They can.
There's a massive difference though between self building for yourself, to live in, and building commercially for other, paying people to live in.
While both need to be at least compliant with minimum standards of some form, commercial builders must be held to a higher standard given the third parties they are putting at risk.
The hyperbole and disdain is unappealing.
It doesn't work when you are building houses for people to live in, where mistakes (say, electrical, structural, or plumbing wise) can lead to fatal incidents.
This lot were the absolute definition of fucking cowboys.
Its exactly the kind of thing I expect from when people in tech go try do something in other sectors without an adult in the room.
Thoughts on the "lessons" (out of order, deliberately).
Lesson 2: Word salad that basically means "we hired people who didn't know what they were doing, and expected the performance of professional tradesmen to just magically happen".
Lesson 1: see lesson 2, but with additional process issues that anyone with any construction experience could have warned you about, and chronic understaffing to keep a lean headcount.
Lesson 3: basically they decided to ignore tried and tested business strategies for growth and wing it instead. This didn't work.
Lesson 4-6 mostly, again, are poor business planning.
See also: recent HN threads of Hackernews readers largely incorrecting each other about work in the trades.