[b40d-48b2-979e]

    Due to the usual “mid size software company not micromanaging the developers”
    standard

You didn't have a device management system or similar product managing software installs (SCCM in Windows land)? That's table stakes for any admin.

[Moto7451]

I believe you’re using royal-you but just to be clear I didn’t run these companies.

At one place there wasn’t and at the other it wasn’t well managed. I agree from a compliance point of view and have advocated for this but I was not on the IT/Ops side of the business so I could only use soft power.

The CTO at the first company had a “zero hindrances for the developers” mindset and the latter was reeling from being the merger of five different companies. The latter did a better job of trying to say the least but wasn’t great about it. Outcome was the same none the less.

[jabroni_salad]

I mainly consult but we have a few managed clients that are dev houses too. We do their employee onboarding, wrangle their licensing, keep them updated, give them a self service storefront for commercial software that they pay for, add SSO integrations for them etc. Basically they wanted to do NoOps but also didnt want to have to procure or configure their equipment.

But outside of 'make sure the oracle lawyers never contact us' they dont want us policing them and they are admins on their own devices. For a lot of businesses their computer network has separate production and business zones and the production zone is a YOLO type situation.

[coredog64]

Amazon has device management but still allows developers to install software via `brew`. Windows is slightly more locked down in that user's don't have admin by default, but there's a very low bar to clear to get it temporarily.

[b40d-48b2-979e]

Brew also has workbrew which gives the admin control of the repository. There's also JAMF on macos. None of these systems must give developers free reign to violate software licenses.

[dangus]

Device management != micromanaging developer workflow.

At my midsize company, our engineers could absolutely say something like “we don’t like Terraform Cloud, we want to switch to OpenTofu and env0” and our management would be okay with it and make it happen as long as we justify the change.

We wouldn’t even really have to ask permission if the change was no cost.

[ajcp]

-> and make it happen.

I think OPs point is they failed on this part. "Making it happen" should have been ensuring a compliant and approved version of the software was the one made available to the developers. At a large scale that is done via device management, but even at a medium sized enterprise that should have been done via a source management portal of some sort.

[Moto7451]

Yup, exactly that. The situation shouldn’t have even happened in the first place but sometimes that’s just how it goes.

I’ve consulted at some places that should have been licensing Dicker Desktop and I just skipped the workflow headaches and used Rancher from the start with the compatibility aliases installed. A lot of places are simply unaware.