Blocking system cofiguration is a totally different issue. A lot of coders are especially tied to their OS of choice, and with Linux, even different distros can be night and day. There are some distros that I don't think I could reasonably work with (not to name names). And I suspect a lot of coders are pretty inherently mistrustful of what might be lurking in a preinstalled system that they aren't allowed to wipe. (Keystroke logging? Remote VNC? Is the camera on right now?)

I haven't worked at a place yet that didn't budget a little time up front for me to get up and running, but it's mainly the feeling of restriction that gets to me. What if the coders get upset enough that they start developing remotely, pushing all their code back and forth over ssh/rsync/whatever, and using their laptops as thin clients? Do you block ssh traffic? Ouch. Lots of coders are brilliant and love subverting restrictions. It seems keeping everything locked up could turn demoralizing for both sides to say nothing of the huge time sink.