Do Your Developers Have Local Admin Rights?

plover writes "I work as a developer for a Very Large American Corporation. We are not an IT company, but have a large IT organization that does a lot of internal development. In my area, we do Windows development, which includes writing and maintaining code for various services and executables. A few years ago the Info Security group removed local administrator rights from most accounts and machines, but our area was granted exceptions for developers. My question is: do other developers in other large companies have local admin rights to their development environment? If not, how do you handle tasks like debugging, testing installations, or installing updated development tools that aren't a part of the standard corporate workstation?"

Generally, yes

[PIPBoy3000]

We're local admins of the application servers, and a couple of us have domain admin rights. We generally haven't run into problems with this, as we have a strict policy of making fun of anyone who screws up badly. It involves Photoshop and is generally a memorable way to resolve the situation.

Re:Yeah.

[Thad Zurich]

Well considering that almost every security vulnerability ever reported has developers as a root cause, not sure you can really claim they cause less harm. The harm just gets postponed until it is maximally expensive.

Re:What?

[Anonymous Coward]

# LS
LS-not found

Yeah, I should have root.

IT isn't allowed to touch my workstation

[ap0]

My company's IT department is totally incompetent. Their solution to everything is whatever Microsoft sells, regardless if it's actually a better choice than another option out there. They don't even give any sort of open source solution a second look. My boss and I (the only two developers at our office) don't have domain logins and administer our own machines. We don't have access to any of the intranet apps, but I've never needed them. We do hardware development so we need admin rights. We administer our own development servers, as well. The NAS thing IT installed failed, and it wasn't backed up anywhere, so the entire office lost their shared and backed up data. Except us, since we knew that would probably happen. We don't trust them to back up our code.

For the other employees at the office, whenever it's time to update software or install patches, one of the IT droogs calls an employee and tells them they'll be taking over their machine to update it (remotely, because there aren't any IT staff at our office -- they're all at another office). They do this in the middle of the friggin' day. And since they do the updates manually instead of automated updates, they'll take over someone's machine for sometimes hours, so they can't get any work done.

So, yes, we have local admin rights. We are our own admins since we can't trust our IT department to do things right. We still have a single T1 to the office (actually two, but they don't know how to configure the router properly to get both of them working), and we're told to "schedule" our downloads for after hours so as not to use up bandwidth. I got blocked from the network awhile back for downloading some stuff to do my damn job. No warning. They just blocked the IP, so I'd change it, and they'd block it again. Finally they called me and told me that I need to wait til after business hours to get this 50MB file I need to get my work done.

Re:You damn well should

[McGruber]

How can a competent developer not understand operating system concepts?

They're "web developers"

Re:You damn well should

[dem0n1]

bear watching.

Where is it?