Oftentimes build farms that I've came across were implemented by leveraging the local dev machines so it would naturally scale with number of devs. Copying back

Oftentimes build farms that I've came across were implemented by leveraging the local dev machines so it would naturally scale with number of devs. Copying back the debug build is indeed more of an issue as it depends on network gears that rarely scale linearly with headcount. Yet I would expect network transfers to take only a fraction of the build time, if those 500mb of output are associated with the 10mins builds referred to in the OP, possibly even in a WFH environment these days. I'd rather believe that build farms work better in a more homogeneous environment and require more work to maintain, whereas every individual dev can manage his own machine, especially in our post-distro world (old grumpy man wanted to add: I remember a time when I was a new hire in a company and my manager asked me to attach my desktop to the build farm; I must have had a face like "Huho, sounds complicated" so he added: "I mean, just apt-get install distcc")