Comment by pdimitar

I am a programmer with 22 years of practice and I stand with you.

The churn gets very tiring at one point and you begin to suspect that the people who impose it on you actually have no clue what they're doing and are taking the easy way out because they want to clock out for the week. Which I do understand but pretending that it's for the good of everyone is obviously bogus.

IMO all you scientist folks should work closely with a few programmers and sysadmins and have them author you tools to bring up and down various environments. It's easy and it's much more churn-proof than what we currently do.

I am still in the process of authoring a script to bring up my dev environment everywhere I go, I need to iron out a few kinks in the initial bootstrap (as in, OS and Linux-distro specific ways to install several critically important tools before installing everything else) and I'll just provision a few laptops at home and a VM in the cloud and be done with it.

It's annoying but ultimately a worth investment. Look into it and ask your dev friends.