Re:You damn well should (Score 1)

I work in a large company and we see numerous issues with admin rights. Drive by infections via web browser, Software compliance issues (yes they do Download and install pirated applications,.. to their entire group), removing compliance software, locking IT department out of their workstation or server. A good IT department has the resources and facilitation to distribute the applications that a developer needs quickly and to globally manage every system on the network. To your point of "Any developer who can't competently administer his own machine is incompetent". Well that is the last think a developer does, they do not admin or take care of their machines. In fact in the places that I have worked the developers are the least patched and generally worst maintained systems. It is also difficult as the global sys admin to maintain their systems due to all of the unknowns on their systems. Whether it is a system variable that a maintenance script relied on that they changed because they didn’t know why it was there. We even had to hack into our own system because the user removed us as admins and we could not get in.