[nfm]

I think the whole sysadmin/devops thing is an inescapable problem to some degree.

If it's something that nobody on your team can tackle you can easily end up with completely disparate development environments (with devs running different ruby versions, app servers, even databases!) when there's no well documented system for setting up environments.

Heroku makes it dead simple to deploy and add services, but if your team can't manage to do that for local development anyway, things can end up in a really bad state.