Depends on the company, maybe some methods seem primitive by our standards but they can be extremely effective nonetheless. I strongly suspect a lot of it unnecessary, I've seen a VC funded startup tackle the same problem that someone solved with a mailing list. Software expertise seems to be the most expensive generic skill set that you can hire for anywhere today -- even if you hire the people they still might be crippled by having to work with legacy infrastructure; I've seen a live SCO Unix server not too long ago.