For most companies out there, that involves hiring someone with Linux/Windows server management skills. Even in an engineering company, if you have a choice between spending engineer's time on engineering projects or system management, the company usually gets more bang for the buck for the former.
Put differently, the best backend developers are also the ones that can compile nginx from source (a rare talent nowadays apparently) and have it running reliably within the hour. Better by no small factor either. There's no shortage of them.
A few years back you could have the same argument with an army of Exchange administrators who would point out how ridiculous it would be to trust your entire company's email infrastructure to Gmail, yet here we are.
You do need things like build-essential installed (which we'd let them install however they wanted). And a blank ./configure normally complains about missing pcre and maybe gzip (I forget). But we'd just tell them they could install without it (and the error message makes it very clear how to do that (--without-pcre or whatever).
Very sad.
What IaaS really saves you is the tedium of dealing with the physical aspects of servers. No requisitioning hardware, driving to co-los, dealing with phasing hardware out, etc.