Those few employees are probably going to all be developers, and despite there being a bunch of mathematics and engineering involved, being a developer is very much a creative process. Similarly, I wouldnât begrudge a digital artist for wanting to use a Mac to do their work.
If a developer is asking for a thing, theyâre not asking for it because theyâve suddenly developed a nervous tic. Thereâs typically a reason behind it. Maybe its because they want to learn that thing to stay relevant, or explore itâs feasibility, or maybe itâs to support another project.
I used to get the old âwe donât support thing because nobody uses thingâ a lot. The problem with that thinking is that unless support for whatever thing immaculates out of nowhere itâll just never happen. And thatâs a tough sell for a developer who needs to stay relevant.
I remember in like 2019 I asked for my company to host git repos on the corporate network, and I got a hard no. Same line, there wasnât a need, nobody uses git. I was astounded. I thought my request was pretty benign and would just sail right through because by that point it was almost an industry standard to use git. I vented about it to some devs in another department and learned that they had a system with local admin attached to the corporate network that somehow IT didnât know about. They were using that to host their repos.
I guess what Iâm trying to say is that if keeping employees happy is too expensive, then you gotta at least be aware of the potential costs of unhappy employees.
My last employer had several thousand employees. Some of the IT guys knew Linux, but it wasnât anywhere in the organization. I managed to convince them to let me install Linux on my desktop. They said sure, with the provision that I was not allowed to have a single issue. If I had an issue, theyâd format it back. It was a fantastic last 8-9 years at work, as far as computer use went.
My usual reply to said employees is âif you know how to install and configure a Linux distro, you probably also know how to solve your own problemsâ. Everything else is pretty much deployed over AD, so if you can get to the point where you need admin creds to hook to the DCs, then do whatever you like.
Eventually, all of them failed to even get close to being a part of the AD DC and that is where the story ended.
learned that they had a system with local admin attached to the corporate network that somehow IT didnât know about. They were using that to host their repos.
Thatâs called shadow IT and is a huge security risk.
