Close. In 2011, all the engineer desktops got upgraded to 36Gigs. At the time, the eng department still hadn't figured out how to deploy without duplicating hundreds of jar files everywere.
Then their hearts sank when they realized why.
Somebody suggested LinkedIn is one large application, which is absolutely false. It's composed of many small applications, each deployed as a WAR file since the non-Node.js part of the site is on the JVM. There's a lot of overhead that comes from deploying this way. It doesn't matter in production or staging, but it adds up on a desktop.
At this point in time though, dev machines have stopped growing because we have shared stacks you can deploy a couple pieces of the application against if you want to test the whole thing.