At my internship, one of the senior developers (a great guy, wish we had stayed in touch more), joked about building a company out of developer's machines (like a, Developer Machines As A Service type thing), so then, software will always work. After all, it works on MY machine!
I recently got a job and that’s how it is here. (I’m not sure if they’re actually VMs, they’re very powerful machines.)
One of the first things you do when you get hired here as a developer is request that a machine get provisioned for you in the data center and provide your public ssh key. You’re not allowed to do anything on the MacBook they give you other than mail/wiki/chat/ssh. IMO it’s pretty brilliant.
One extra nice thing is that the OPs people rather than the corporate IT people manage it so it actually works well.
