My company's IT department is totally incompetent. Their solution to everything is whatever Microsoft sells, regardless if it's actually a better choice than another option out there. They don't even give any sort of open source solution a second look. My boss and I (the only two developers at our office) don't have domain logins and administer our own machines. We don't have access to any of the intranet apps, but I've never needed them. We do hardware development so we need admin rights. We administer our own development servers, as well. The NAS thing IT installed failed, and it wasn't backed up anywhere, so the entire office lost their shared and backed up data. Except us, since we knew that would probably happen. We don't trust them to back up our code.
For the other employees at the office, whenever it's time to update software or install patches, one of the IT droogs calls an employee and tells them they'll be taking over their machine to update it (remotely, because there aren't any IT staff at our office -- they're all at another office). They do this in the middle of the friggin' day. And since they do the updates manually instead of automated updates, they'll take over someone's machine for sometimes hours, so they can't get any work done.
So, yes, we have local admin rights. We are our own admins since we can't trust our IT department to do things right. We still have a single T1 to the office (actually two, but they don't know how to configure the router properly to get both of them working), and we're told to "schedule" our downloads for after hours so as not to use up bandwidth. I got blocked from the network awhile back for downloading some stuff to do my damn job. No warning. They just blocked the IP, so I'd change it, and they'd block it again. Finally they called me and told me that I need to wait til after business hours to get this 50MB file I need to get my work done.
