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> It used to be, dev workstations and environments were fully IT controlled and curated. Then everyone moaned and complained about not having local admin access to their machine (I get it, it sucks and is annoying, but there is a reason), and then devtools started dumping themselves in %APPDATA& and user directories to bypass the admin requirement for installs. It's about more than lack of admin access. One uncomfortable truth I've realized over the course of my career is that the more IT "manages", the worse my computer becomes by basically any metric you can think of: stability, performance, predictability, inspectability. I've lost count of the number of times IT have broken things for me. Often, the security software they require itself has unacceptable, careless security flaws (e.g., hardcoded passwords, completely incorrect permissions checks). Uptime of systems, even laptops, that I own can be measured in months. IT and security departments mandate the installation of so much downright shoddy software that they often end up requiring (sometimes formally!) weekly reboots just to keep the system "stable". Frankly, I've yet to work at a company where IT or security has done what I would consider to be adequate testing of their own policies and tools. I have sadly learned down to my bones that each time I'm informed (if I'm ever informed!) that some new thing on my system will henceforth be "controlled" by some department that sees policies and standards as their mandate, no matter whether they have a "test group" that trials the stuff ahead of me or not, my system is about to permanently degrade. And more often than not, literally no one will be able to answer basic questions about the behavior of the system anymore, because the kind of people who buy and implement turnkey corporate IT solutions don't really know much about what that software does. (After all, not having to really know what it does is the whole selling point of such solutions.) |