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.
I work in software at a large corpo and I don’t normally have access to install anything that doesn’t come from the company’s internal repository of third party apps.
But there is a pre installed app on my laptop that i can use to get temporary admin access for my laptop in a few seconds. But while the temporary admin access is on, everything I do gets logged for accountability. I’ve used this temp admin before for setting some environment variables.
Most things I work on happen in a big cloud provider (AWS, GCP, Azure, etc.) and the role I have access to on our cloud provider account has very limited privileges (esp in prod). Adding a new privilege to the role needs to go through two rounds of peer review + one round of manager review.