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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?"
As an admin, I've supported both types of environment. Depending on what the development project is, sometimes it's just better to allow the developers to have full admin rights in order to add compilers and other development tools required for project completion. The developers were responsible for all O/S issues related to installation of non-standard development tools, but would rely on the sysadmins for hardware support, as the service contracts were part of the corporate global service contracts. There's no easy answer on this one, and it pretty much depends on company policy around allowing admin access to non-admins. Personally, as an admin, I prefer to maintain control of what is installed on the systems under my umbrella, as it makes patching and upgrading easier when I know what's already there, and what dependencies are required.
That's the way it always is. The admins want to limit control to make their jobs easier, and the developers want full control to make their jobs easier, and never the twain shall meet.
About the best compromise I've ever seen is where admins say to the developers, "You can have local admin rights. However, don't keep anything important on your local disk (use network shares and source control), because we're not going to even attempt to support your unsupported software. If you bring your machine in with a problem, it's getting imaged, and that's that."
That usually makes the admins happy, because they don't have to increase their workload, and makes developers less likely to bork their machines, because no developer wants to lose a day reinstalling IDEs, etc.
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