I saw a comment yesterday about how IT admins have to restrict the privileges of other developers on their machines and was surprised by knowing this. I simply thought that employees in the software industry were essentially at equal parity in terms of their departments, and that the admin department was there just to centralise all the work done by other departments and keep track of the status of their systems. I did not think there would be a need to apply childlocks on other employees’ systems as I assumed that a person working at an industry like this would have basic computer literacy to know what is safe and permissible by company policy to execute and what is not.
This may come off as being too naive of me, but I genuinely want to understand how the hierarchy in such a company is actually like. I always thought of workspaces in the software industry to divide labour laterally and there would be no need for administrative powers apart from the management to exist, at least in regard to regulating other workers’ actions beyond normal workspace policies. It would be extremely kind of anyone to shed light on this matter.
It’s always better to be safe than sorry. Many Software devs can be trusted to not do anything too stupid with their machines, but every person has blind spots and can be tricked. At the company I work at, the IT system is pretty permissive at what can and can’t be done, but the Admins do block installing programs that ask for too many permissions under the hood (like some custom drivers and things that want console access) or that simply aren’t allowed due to company policy (i.e. Postman, because it just sends too much information to the cloud). Even a well-meaning dev usually isn’t aware of all the details of a program they want to install or the company policies - there are too many to reasonably know at all times. So it’s easier to block stuff, and if someone really does need something they just ask and get it unblocked for themselves.
You can also never be sure that a dev isn’t doing anything malicious. Of course that’s rare, but when it happens the damage to all company projects is just too large.
It’s also not much of a hierarchy thing, the Admins are on exactly the same level as devs, their job is just a bit different.