[StableAlkyne]

> Your IT department should be vetting it, deploying it, and keeping it up-to date for you.

There are not enough IT staff at my organization to do this. They have an approved list of software that may be installed. Some common installations are automated, others are niche-enough that it's DIY.

We don't live in a perfect world where the IT staffing ratio is 1:20 (or whatever arbitrary number you would consider "good"), so this is how my organization does it.

> unfortunately we can't let everyone install anything.

Who is this "we?"

[IAmBroom]

"We" are the large-enough companies to have full IT departments. (I hate this practice, but it is necessary.)

"Your" IT department should consider giving you your own admin account. But it's their call.

[StableAlkyne]

> Your" IT department should consider giving you your own admin account. But it's their call.

Seems like a bit of an extreme solution for one-off installations that are rare enough to not be worth bothering to automate.

Good example of this is scientific software like Gaussian (a "common" quantum mechanics package): needs admin, expensive and strict license that gets audited. It's approved, but we have a single digit number of people using it. It's just not worth the time to automate a script around an install that only happens once every year or so on average, when they can just temporarily elevate the user.