That's certainly true for staff that works on a given codebase full-time. However, there are a lot (I saw an estimate of something like 40%) of developers who a

That's certainly true for staff that works on a given codebase full-time. However, there are a lot (I saw an estimate of something like 40%) of developers who are part-time, at least to one of their relevant projects. Think also of other people who work on software projects: designers, doc, etc. Also keep in mind that many/most larger organizations don't have a single codebase, so this doesn't apply just to new hires. Everybody at a large organization would by definition be new on most of their code projects. If a developer is going to work on a project for only two weeks, you're basically throwing away 20% of their time. Alternatively, you don't assign people to short-term projects where they might be able to add value because of the overhead. Worth noting also: Nitrous works with any local editor and deploys to whatever, so I'm not really sure how there's lock-in.