From the other extreme: One thing I hate about most developers is that they have to use 15 different kinds of nails to join two boards together.

We have a full platform implemented, base images available, standards on how applications are developed and deployed, extensive documentation, etc. This has evolved over time along with the projects and business. This represents a _huge_ amount of work being abstracted away.

But every week we have to have another discussion about pulling in the database-of-the-week or language-of-the-week because apparently we were completely unable to develop basic CRUD apps until the new hottest crypto-document-as-a-service-database came along to let us store and retrieve data.

And every time they think _their_ application deserves special snowflake status. We're just making things difficult, they could fire up a VM and have this set up in 15 minutes.

This completely fails to account for _most_ of the actual work involved in setting most production systems up properly. How is this being kept updated and patched? Where are the backups? Where's the monitoring? What's the disaster recovery plan? Where's the documentation? Never mind trying to integrate it into all of our existing systems (making sure it's on the appropriate subnet, has appropriately configured security groups, etc, etc).

This also completely fails to account for the long tail: Even if you reimplement all of this, now it _all_ needs to be maintained for the life of your application. Any time we need to make major infrastructure-level changes, we need to account for n+1 different systems that need to be updated. If we need to do any migrations, we need to migrate n+1 things. If you need functionality X, we can't re-use the existing battle-tested modular templates to provide it to you it has to be implemented from scratch (and also maintained indefinitely).

Most devs I've worked with aren't well-versed enough in ops to understand the full immediate scope nor the long tail. They only see the project as far as, and only plan to see it through as far as, get it working and shitfix as required.

To your dashboard example... it's for 10 people, but that doesn't change the underlying equation for most of these things. The fact that only 10 people use it will not stop it being turned into a jumpbox for some hacker group or getting our external IPs blackholed after it sends a bunch of spam because nobody bothered to patch the OS for five years. The fact that it's only for 10 people doesn't mean it's not business critical and could be down indefinitely. The fact that it's only for 10 people doesn't mean we shouldn't have a local/staging environment and should be working in prod. The fact that it's only for 10 people doesn't mean it doesn't need to integrate into any other systems (where is it sourcing data? how is it authenticating users? how is it authenticating itself to other systems?). The fact that it's only for 10 people doesn't mean someone doesn't have to maintain it after you're gone.

Following the standard _should_ be the happy path so that you don't have to worry about all this stuff. If it's not, I think your ops department was just dropping the ball.