You're almost describing the ideal workplace that I've been looking for. Unsuccessfully. I shouldn't even need to say this, but don't make me waste onboarding

You're almost describing the ideal workplace that I've been looking for. Unsuccessfully. I shouldn't even need to say this, but don't make me waste onboarding time with setting up my development environment. You already know the project I'm going to work on, you already know what I will need, and you should already have a way to reproduce the local environment for that project; the only thing I should have to do is add my SSH key, and everything should work with only that. Just give me access to a VM with low latency (<=50ms) and let me do my job there. You can set it up however you want, install whatever you think I'll need, configure VPC firewall however you want. Let me take and restore snapshots of the VM itself. You're going to want something beefy too, for builds and stuff. For some reason, most projects I've worked on take at least 30 seconds (usually longer) between the moment I make a change until the moment I can see it, so not having to wait that much would be nice at least. Yes, there's disadvantages. For example, you have to know that if I can't access it I won't be able to do anything (and not paying people because of this would be unfair). And also please ensure that other devs can't just sign commits with my keys. But, as someone biased because I do most hobby development "remotely" (in a Docker container, or in a FreeBSD jail, or in a VPS at ~50ms latency), your scenario sounds nice.