On one of my previous jobs my employer wanted to give me a macbook pro.
My view of OSX and Apple in general is very close to your view of MS Office 2013. I told them “let me try virtualization first”, inserted more RAM to my own Windows laptop, and used VmWare virtual machine for iOS development for the next couple of years.
My main customer insists all work be done on a company computer, using only company-approved software, installed by company admins. And don't even think about desecrating the machine by inserting a non-company USB stick!
Which is, admittedly, quite good from a security standpoint.
And even for larger companies with more bureaucracy, developers who do native code development often need to be local administrators on their PCs. To do my job, very often I need the permissions to install and upgrade software, debug stuff, install system services…
Well I also do some native code development.
That's why I have been given a tool that grants me limited time local SU privileges, given I enter at least 3 words in the field for "reason", and a valid cost center ID. I kid you not: It seems that executing a piece of code that grants me time limited local SU privileges leads to some company-internal financial flow to the IT department!
Edit: Installing s/w, btw, is usually done by opening a ticket with IT. If the required s/w is approved by IT, it will be queued for installation in the company's own s/w and configuration management tool chain in a few hours.
About your administrator tool, yeah, that sucks.
I once worked in a company where the managers were paranoid about us leaking the source code of the game we developed. We all had 2 PCs, one for development, another one for the Internet, two physically-separate local networks, a one-way network share to copy stuff (read-write from the online LAN, read-only from the offline LAN), and a KVM switches so we only needed a single display + keyboard.
It was very inconvenient, e.g. unable to copy-paste stuff from stackoverflow.
I used to have to do w/o the web for the longest time - but fortunately not w/o email!
So in desperate cases I used my telephone for web access and copy/pasted stuff into an email to myself@company.
In the mean time I do have web access there, but I had to ask the head of department to e-sign his approval on the application. Fortunately, he's a cool and reasonably guy and signed it no questions asked.
Not necessarily unwarranted; I still remember the leak of the source code for Half-Life 2 making headlines back in 2003.
https://games.slashdot.org/story/03/10/02/1547218/half-life-...
(Good grief, has it really been that long since Half-Life 2? I feel old.)