Ask HN: Do you get to have local admin rights on your work computer? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Do you get to have local admin rights on your work computer?

1 pointwycy2 comments

In my industry (defense), users don't get to be local admins on their Windows machines. All software needs to be requested and installed by IT. I'm curious how this works in other industries. How do you get software installed? How do you make changes to system settings?

The long story behind why I ask:

I recently requested Cygwin and VS Code and handed over my laptop to IT. Cygwin was approved for installation on the network in general and in my room in particular. VS Code was approved on the network but not yet approved in my room, so someone had to go through the process of getting it approved in my room as well. I received my laptop back 1.5 months later with VS Code nowhere to be found and Cygwin lacking the packages I need (compilers), so I'll be starting again back at the beginning of this process. Incredibly frustrating stuff. Also, there are certain icons on my desktop which I don't have permissions to delete. Surely this can't be the norm across all industries?

Luckily, I also have a Linux machine.

Not having admin rights is absolutely the norm in corporate environments, and any business who entrusts anyone but IT with admin rights is going to be a bad investment bet, because everything they have is going to end up getting torched or leaked online.

That being said, you definitely have a more painful process for approval of software in that industry (and I'm not too surprised). Where I work, if a user requested VS Code, I'd load it up in our software distribution system, and remotely push it to their PC. I certainly wouldn't take their PC off their hands for a month and a half.

Usually if a user needs a system setting changed, it's a peeve for multiple people or applicable to a whole department. We can push out policy changes to groups of PCs or users which make changes to their PCs. Unremovable desktop shortcuts can be removed about a minute after someone sends me an email, but are generally there on multi-user PCs where a shortcut should be available to anyone who might log into it.

Interesting--when I was in IT, the last non-defense company I worked at did allow local admin access, and it seemed to go reasonably okay. We definitely fielded more support requests because of it but nothing too crazy. Granted, that was a decade ago and at a relatively small (~400 employee) company.

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