Having worked for a few shops where the internally developed software I helped write was seen as an expense, and a tool to facilitate the company's real work, I

Having worked for a few shops where the internally developed software I helped write was seen as an expense, and a tool to facilitate the company's real work, I'm skeptical this will work all that well in the general case. My data points, though limited in number, indicate a strong tendency on the part of these kinds of shops to build solutions that are over-fit to their particular workflows, and to under-resource their development. I was, in one of these environments, explicitly told that version control and separate development/test/production — or even just dev and prod — environments were a silly extravagance. I'm sure there exist shops that don't do it that badly. I'm more sure, however, that they're not the norm.