Ie, your job will be around and also for your resume, it's better to say I worked at Westwood, or Origin then Joe Blow's Software Guys. Unless JBSG happens to be the next Id but more likely JBSG will turn out to go under.
Most small developers do.
Most console systems, Playstation, Nintendo 64, Dreamcast, etc. require a development system. For example the Playstation development system is a board or set of boards that plugs into your PC and basically has a programmable playstation on the board. Many tools are supplied for example a TSR that lets your PSX programs read files from your PC's hard drive so you don't have to burn a new CD every time you want to try some new data in your game. For example you can't easily simulate video from the PC hard drive because the playstation uses special format CD sectors and timing info and there is no way to supply that info through software easily. For example the sound data during video is never read into ram.