I'm not in a senior position and I HATE getting the shit sandwich, it's irritating and insulting. Most of my coworkers (in various positions of seniority) also hate it.
I wouldn't use it period, unless you know for certain the specific person cannot handle criticism.
I have a Mac Mini on 24/7 that's a web/mail/file server. This is for my small business, so there is activity but nothing heavy. Absolutely more than capable of adding a dozen people for social networking.
This consumes 12W while idle, which is probably 99.9% of the day, these are just background daemons carrying out requests all day for loading the website and sending/receiving email.
It's cheaper than a hosting service and I have 100% physical control over my server. If it goes down for a power outage or whatever, the same exact thing happens on Linode every few months. Email will just start to backlog until your server comes back online.
You are at the mercy of your ISP though, the biggest hurdle is port blocking if they're bastards about it. Most of them are, but there are ways around it.