Anyone with "software engineer", "developer", or "programmer" in their job title should be given full benefit of the doubt by default and only bothered if the program is proven malware. It's our job to know what we're doing, so we should have admin too. I feel like Ron Swanson in Home Depot every time I have to ask IT to do something.
As someone who’s been responsible for dealing with the consequences of “programmer” output, I’d say that they definitely should not be given the benefit of the doubt. While it may be hard to believe, the average “programmer” knows nothing about IT or networking or hardware, and you’d be lucky if they know where the power button is.
Generally “programmer” type folks are only power users in the context of software, possibly even only the software they wrote or tooling they chose.
> It's our job to know what we're doing, so we should have admin too.
Nope.
Engineers and programmers are the most-likely source of "I know what I'm doing so I can run it this way" and you end up with things like NFS running on systems that haven't been bounced in over 300 days and can't be updated because someone used sudo to break yum.
No one gets admin unless they explicitly need it. Period. Because while you may actually know what you're doing, most programmers haven't the slightest inkling about safe computing practices, based on experience.
Well, I’m glad I don’t work for you. I work for a Fortune 100 company with nearly 100,000 employees and we all have admin/root access to our company provided hardware. I’ve worked here for decades and have never heard anything through the IT grapevine of issues arising from this.
I, too, work for a fortune 500. They're actually in the top 100. No idea how many employees, though.
Every instance I've encountered with an engineer having root/admin permissions has been a shitshow.
I just now encountered an instance of engineers bypassing policy by modifying sudoers to give a lower priv'd generic/shared account passwordless sudo to shit like /usr/bin/make.
The other project I was on, I had to fight with engineers about why having a firewall on your appliance doesn't negate the need to address code execution exploits behind the firewall. These aren't security-savy individuals and they shouldn't ever be given administrative access to anything.
I'm glad you don't work for me, too; I can't stand leadership positions. I work in security and all I see are engineers fucking up daily, so I'm pretty jaded/biased at this point.
"Anyone with "software engineer", "developer", or "programmer" in their job title should be given full benefit of the doubt"
No one gets the benefit of the doubt, and certainly not programmers. You get more leeway with what we'll allow, but not free reign. Most programmers aren't HN level.
I'm not a programmer at all, my yearly code output these days can be expressed in double digit hours, and very small ones. I assure you, I do not think of myself as a programmer much less a top tier one.
Yeah, I get it, it’s easy to poke at that phrasing.
There’s also a reading of that response where they mean “HN level” like “as confident as the replied-to comment author”. Could even be a bit sarcastic.
No, but there is a curiosity test, you have to find the place; and then once you're here you have to understand things in order to find value and come back.
