Today, I randomly remembered a guy who was doing an internship at my college's tech lab. From what I gathered (I wasn't really part of that group) all they had to do was familiarize themselves with one of the many systems available and... I suppose maintain it or improve it.
.... Poor guy spent the first 2 to 3 weeks just trying to get Ruby on Rails to work. The work he was doing was not (and would never be) critical so there was not much of a sense of urgency.
Someone should have told him to use a fresh VM. Guy was trying to get it to work in his private laptop running windows. A doomed endeavor.