I think it really comes down to developer tooling. Devs, in the absence of tooling will make their own and default to the latest stuff. If the company doesn't p

I think it really comes down to developer tooling. Devs, in the absence of tooling will make their own and default to the latest stuff. If the company doesn't provide a fully mirrored developer environment, then everyone is asking for trouble. Where I work, we have a specific team dedicated to managing this tooling. We support Python Django, Java, and Go. You can clone the base repositories which include vagrant scripts to setup everything. You develop in that and it gets sucked up into the pipeline. You want something newer? If it works locally in our environment, the SLA says it will work in production. Doesn't work locally, then tough shit. In personal projects I do with others, I try and do the same thing. Python? 3.6 is our version target. Java is OpenJDK 1.8.0 latest. Rust & Go are compiled with the latest versions. It might not be incompetence in software engineering as a whole, but more of an issue in defining version and software targets.