In my case it's not a hobby. I actually hate wasting time and money on these kind of things. But on the other side I'm legitimately scared about what's happening with all my digital information. It could be paranoia because of all the privacy movement and the recent scandals but it's not worth the risk when you have very easy to setup tools to improve your privacy like that ones you mentioned in your last paragraph which is exactly what I'm currently using (+ DDG for searching).
Could be, but what if the requirements you're missing are supposedly essential for the job? Some jobs say you need to know X programming language. What if you're a good programmer but haven't worked with that particular language? Should you bother to apply?
A lot of potentially good sites with coding challenges have that problem. You want to improve your coding skills in some language and you end up spending 90% of the time solving a math puzzle and writing 5 lines of code.
Even if you dislike the idea or the price, you should be happy there are companies trying to change what has become a real privacy problem these days. At least for me, it gives me hope to think people out there are working on these issues and trying new approaches with new technology.
I have a Code Keyboard and a Pok3r keyboard. They are both very good but I prefer the feeling of the Pok3r. Keep in mind that's a 60% keyboard so you need to be good at coding without depending on the arrow keys too much.
Don't ask a colleague every time you don't know how to do something. Investigate, learn how to debug. Building intuition is what's going to take you to the next level. Also, try to not get stuck with same tools for too long.
+1. Not easy to setup if you have little cloud experience, but once you have it running, it works really well. I have a fast setup for the ones who like containers and Kubernetes: https://github.com/pacuna/snowplow-pipeline