Should dev be admin on their computer? [closed]

Solution 1:

Should they? That's up to the corporation. Personally I think it's fine as long as there are some understood rules.

1. Being admin on your box is a privilege NOT a right.
   2. Catching viruses on multiple occasions will get the right revoked
   3. Disabling corporate agents will get the right revoked - AV/inventory/software deployment/etc
   4. Basically if you do something that risks the network will get the right revoked
2. Any tools you install must not be made a dependency of your project without getting them on the officially approved list. Ask nicely don't come crashing in the day of the deploy and demand $random_library be installed on all servers with no testing
3. For anything outside of normal applications installed everywhere else support will be best effort. Help desk and/or sysadmins will not spend 5 hours trying to debug why you have dll conflicts.

Solution 2:

Typically I would say yes. Things like debuggers require pretty high if not admin rights to work correctly. Developers often need to install random software which can take days or weeks to get installed when going through channels. During that time the developer is usually work stopped costing the company nothing but money, especially if the developer is a consultant.

Solution 3:

There is both science and art in development; it isn't as simple as "knowing" what we need. If we already had the answer half our job would be moot; finding the correct approach is often iterative, and may involve multiple tools in unpredictable ways. Requiring an intermediary to install each of these (often with high latency), only to find (about an hour in) that for your scenario the "super-uber tool addon" is needed is silly.

While a VM is ideal for this, there are also a lot of development tools that cannot run (properly, or even at all) in a VM, because they themselves are a VM - and I don't mean things like JVM; I mean full machine emus/vms, such as device toolkits. Compatibility there is improving.

Additionally, most development tools have a very large footprint - much larger than "regular" tools (making VM hosting a bit more painful than you might expect), and often by the nature of being a process debugger require elevated access. Not to mention the fact that they may be GUI intensive; trying to run full-time on a VM GUI is... extremely painful.

Performance is a huge are here; would you think it was OK for users to wait 3 seconds after every keypress in Word for their key to register? I am not kidding - development tools on VMs etc can be this sucky; for most development purposes you need responsiveness. Interrupting the flow of complex logic from brain to keyboard can make it pretty much impossible to get the job done. And I hate to say it, but yes: development time is expensive.

Solution 4:

In a Windows environment, and especially when using Microsoft developer products, the dev will require admin rights on their machine. If you deny them those rights their ability to do their jobs will be restricted, if not prevented altogether.