I see these people coming. They are motivated by power for its own sake, and their playbook is limited.
Take heed of this post, it's how the incompetent rise.
Take heed of this post, it's how the incompetent rise.
If people are actually going to make an effort to kick people out to cement their position, then it is better to restrict their access, before they do too much damage. Getting one person who services the need is not worth it if they kick out everyone else.
If the only reason is to cement their position then sure, but there are good reasons to limit the number of admins. The more admins, the more attack vectors for serious social engineering, the harder change control is, the longer meetings go for, the harder it is to make necessary change, etc. etc.
I think if somebody cares enough to become an admin and shows they care about the users then I don't mind them getting a power trip out of it. It's the "admins" that got there because they know the boss, or because they convinced somebody they should have access because their job-title entitles them to it that you need to look out for.
If you want sysadmin power, get DNS access or AWS admin or active directory admin or root on all servers.
Actually, the jira admin probably grants more "power" and visibility onto every manager who's got to come to you for tickets. So it makes sense for politics.
The AWS or Network owner may have the keys to the kingdom in terms of provisioning access, turning off routers, running arbitrary code on things, etc. but that also comes with great responsibility. If you fuck around and break something on accident, or shut down a router on purpose, there will be consequences. You may spend 150% of your day putting out fires and getting yelled at by senior leaders for application-killing lag or outages.
Meanwhile JIRA guy gets to shift blame and interface with leadership. He may not have any power, but depending on the org, he could have a bunch.
When I worked for an ISP -- a big one, chances are everyone here has heard of em -- one of the most powerful people in the PMO was essentially a secretary ("project coordinator") who had the ear of the head of the PMO, the VP of Engineering, and the CTO. She smoked a lot of cigs, so if you could make it to that smokers circle you could twist some powerful levers...