Setting up a local dev instance evolved into a pathological week long chore at any of the startups I've worked at in the past five years. Sadly, he's right and

Setting up a local dev instance evolved into a pathological week long chore at any of the startups I've worked at in the past five years. Sadly, he's right and it is impossible to package up what you need in a sensible manner across multiple platforms. However, most of the toughest bugs I experienced involve the interaction between the load balancer/caching layer and the app layer, or how the system performed when the database was huge. These are impossible to solve with a local instance, anyway. Might as well start out with a process like Quora and have developer instances which you can spin up in the cloud. Having a local setup at all is a waste of time in a world with cheap cloud services.