> Current employer has really scary hardware behind a VPN to run code on. Previous one ran a machine room with lots of servers. Both expected engineer laptops to be mostly thin clients. That seems obviously the right answer to me.
It's quite expensive to set up, regardless of whether we're talking about on-prem or cloud hardware. Your employer is already going to buy you a laptop; why not try to eke out what's possible from the laptop first?
The typical progression, I would think, is (a) laptop only, (b) compilation times get longer -> invest in a couple build cache servers (e.g. Bazel) to support dozens/hundreds of developers, (c) expand the build cache server installation to provide developer environments as well
It's quite expensive to set up, regardless of whether we're talking about on-prem or cloud hardware. Your employer is already going to buy you a laptop; why not try to eke out what's possible from the laptop first?
The typical progression, I would think, is (a) laptop only, (b) compilation times get longer -> invest in a couple build cache servers (e.g. Bazel) to support dozens/hundreds of developers, (c) expand the build cache server installation to provide developer environments as well