This makes sense and isn’t like the shitshow OP is talking about though. I initially assumed the same thing as you, but after reading the OP, the title is the l

This makes sense and isn’t like the shitshow OP is talking about though. I initially assumed the same thing as you, but after reading the OP, the title is the least scary part of their situation by far. At google it has been kinda similar to what you describe for the most part. You got a beefy (depending on your situation, you could end up lucky and snag a powerful 256GB RAM one with bajillion cores) cloud machine into which you SSH or use VSCode Remote with (or the google in-browser code editor running Monaco aka same engine as VSCode that is compatible with most usual VSCode extensions). I was apprehensive at first, but the convenience of “it just werks” is difficult to beat, especially when all of it is integrated well and is the default way of doing things. With that, it takes me less than an hour to go from a brand new machine to building my code and running it like usual (just gotta set the dotfiles for the terminal emulator and the shell + some .zshrc tweaks). No code ever lives locally, so it takes a lot of pressure off. The only downside is being screwed with no internet access, but it has not been an issue so far in my years working there. If i left my laptop at home or something happened to it? No problem, grabbed a loaner laptop, logged in, set it up in under an hour, and it works just as good for the basic work tasks regardless of whether it is macOS or chromeOS or Linux. The whole pain of setting up the environment is straight up gone, and it lets the devs use whichever desktop environment they prefer (as the cloud machines run a flavor of linux anyway, and your laptop OS becomes entirely a personal preference).