[ThrustVectoring]

I got something very different out of it - it reminds me of Auftragstaktik, or leading by mission. Instead of adding explicit restrictions on employees, give them freedom of action. It takes trust that they're the kind of person that would make the kind of decision you want. In other words, having a shared "adult" background.

[EdwardDiego]

My employer treats us as 'fully formed adults' also. It's fantastic, especially after the years I spent in government, where we were all treated like children who required policies on every damned thing to guide us.

An obvious example is about how you use your computer. In my old job, it was highly regulated. Want to install Firefox on your machine? Sorry, that's against IT policy, we only support IE. Your machine is locked down to prevent unauthorised installs, and even if it weren't, you'd be up for a warning for violating the policy.

In my current company, the sysops still limit what they support - for example, they're not willing to support OS X Yosemite users yet, and recommend users stay on Mavericks. But, if you want to upgrade to Yosemite, you can, just don't ask the sysops for help fixing it. And if your broken Yosemite install is impeding your work, well, we trust that you'll resolve it one way or another.

Or another - alcohol. In the government, alcohol at work was banned. A beer at lunch could get you fired. When we had Christmas parties, alcohol was provided, but on a token-per-drink basis. Everyone got two tokens. My current company, the beer fridge is a treasured perk. There are no rules about how much beer you can drink, or when you can drink it. So far, no raging alcoholism has impeded work.

What I really notice is that when you treat people like adults, they respond like adults, and when you treat them like children, they respond like children.

[meowface]

>In my current company, the sysops still limit what they support - for example, they're not willing to support OS X Yosemite users yet, and recommend users stay on Mavericks. But, if you want to upgrade to Yosemite, you can, just don't ask the sysops for help fixing it. And if your broken Yosemite install is impeding your work, well, we trust that you'll resolve it one way or another.

Sorry, but as someone who works in IT security, this sounds like an absolute nightmare. Even if you have a small company comprised only of intelligent developers, those developers do not necessarily understand the latest malware threats or what sorts of software can introduce risks. Wide-open FTP servers and Tomcat servers with default passwords are a major issue. I would actually say developers probably introduce more threats into our environment than any other demographic.

Whitelisting software installs from specific domains (google.com, mozilla.org) is okay, but a carte blanche policy is usually a very bad idea.