How long does it take for you get a new developer in the door, sitting at a desk, productively coding? How long? A few days, multiple weeks? If you are developing enterprise systems, the answer is probably closer to a week than a day. A developer has to download a large, daunting list of tools, configure source control, and understand an often highly customized build system.
This particular inefficiency is the proverbial “elephant in the room” because you have to actively ignore how much time a team of ten or a hundred developers spends installing, reinstalling, tweaking, experimenting with, and arguing over different development environments. We’ve automated almost every other aspect of the enterprise, but the developers are still hand-crafting custom workstations.