A few places give a personal VM to each dev so they can run multiple services on one machine without wrecking local performance.

I've been working at companies that didn't and people had to run N services, rabbitmq, mongo, postgres locally just to test some stuff.

Add this zoom on top and your CPU will hate you.

A half decent laptop would solve this problem.

It depends on how much crap you're running on it. At the above company everyone was on recent macbook pros.

The model I tend to favour in general is to have service being edited running locally and let it talk to services running in a dev environment.

This was my exact reaction!!! Why do dev need dedicated VMs? I can see a QA environment but devs should most definitely be using local dev environment… vagrant etc.