This may be workable for a certain subset of projects, but programmers often have much more on their system than the end user. End users don't need a bloated IDE, an SQL server, an HTTP server, etc all running at the same time. Trying to run all of these programs on an old computer is of zero benefit to the process. Better to give programmers a new machine with remote desktop access to a slower computer/virtual machine that they can use to test out their software.
You could easily argue the opposite as well. Developers don't need an IDE, a SQL server, an HTTP server, etc running on their device at all. The choice is to use a bloated IDE that most people only use a small fraction of the features for. The servers could all run on a dev server and compile/test cycles can be done on similar servers.
Mind you I don't necessarily agree with all of this. Well except the IDE part, Vim and Emacs are tools that more people need to learn.
> The servers could all run on a dev server and compile/test cycles can be done on similar servers.
In every case I've had a dev db running on a shared test server, that DB has been woefully underspecced for the purpose and often in a datacenter with 300ms latency from the office over the company VPN.
While production instances are in the same datacenter as the production DB with 5ms latency.
