I work at a VOIP services provider and we operate multiple brands which are companies we’ve acquired over several years. One thing that has rang true of every company we’ve acquired is that there is typically barely even a way to run one piece locally, let alone the whole thing.

Some of these when I took over there wasn’t even version control, and they were being developed by FTPing files to production server or even editing them live with vim or something. Certainly no reproducible containerization or even VMs to speak of.

I agree completely with you about having a solid development environment. I’ve spent the better part of a year creating such a thing for some of the brands, and it has increased our time to ship features and fixes probably ten fold.