I saw a comment yesterday about how IT admins have to restrict the privileges of other developers on their machines and was surprised by knowing this. I simply thought that employees in the software industry were essentially at equal parity in terms of their departments, and that the admin department was there just to centralise all the work done by other departments and keep track of the status of their systems. I did not think there would be a need to apply childlocks on other employees’ systems as I assumed that a person working at an industry like this would have basic computer literacy to know what is safe and permissible by company policy to execute and what is not.
This may come off as being too naive of me, but I genuinely want to understand how the hierarchy in such a company is actually like. I always thought of workspaces in the software industry to divide labour laterally and there would be no need for administrative powers apart from the management to exist, at least in regard to regulating other workers’ actions beyond normal workspace policies. It would be extremely kind of anyone to shed light on this matter.
It is a mix of ignorance, control, fear, and compliance. In finance in particular, insider threats are a real thing and it leads to the exact kinds of situations you’re describing. The cognitive dissonance of trusting someone enough to pay them a salary and deploy code to production (after peer verification), but not trusting them enough to manually touch a database is real. And it is the result of mitigating company risks, and following laws and regulations. No, it doesn’t make any sense. Yes, it should all be aligned, but you know, humans. All of that said, sometimes people do dumb things unintentionally, and the controls are there to mitigate those instances, too. Ultimately, you just deal with the bullshit because fighting it does no one any good. The powers that be only care about making money. And if you, peon developer, need to jump through a bunch of bullshit hoops in order to do your job, management doesn’t give a shit. That is what they are paying you for, after all.