I read the OP a little differently than I read some of the comments.
Imagine you are brought into a messed up development culture with some authority to make changes. You can't build the product from source, you can only patch it. You can't build a test database from migrations, fixtures, or whatever, there are "magic" development databases. And so on and so forth.
You think about things, remember this old post, and institute the following goal:
"We must be able to take a workstation from email and appropriate access to checking in a change in one business day. Document the steps, re-organize development, everything so that we can sit down with any new hire and get them to set everything up and commit a change on their first day."
It might be empowering for the developer. It might also be a forcing function for fixing issues with your development environment.
Imagine you are brought into a messed up development culture with some authority to make changes. You can't build the product from source, you can only patch it. You can't build a test database from migrations, fixtures, or whatever, there are "magic" development databases. And so on and so forth.
You think about things, remember this old post, and institute the following goal:
"We must be able to take a workstation from email and appropriate access to checking in a change in one business day. Document the steps, re-organize development, everything so that we can sit down with any new hire and get them to set everything up and commit a change on their first day."
It might be empowering for the developer. It might also be a forcing function for fixing issues with your development environment.