I've being running a contract development shop for about 20 years and I think that this is very out of line. That said, our usual approach to dealing with cust

I've being running a contract development shop for about 20 years and I think that this is very out of line. That said, our usual approach to dealing with customer-required installs like VPN clients is to just spin up a VM using VMWare Workstation on our development machines and do all of the things that touch their network with that. Given the nature of our work, we connect to their environments as little as possible and we leave those VMs off at all other times. We haven't had any problems with that approach thus far. Additionally, we don't offer our clients the option of giving us development laptops for our work with them. That just makes us churn hours without producing anything while we deal with whatever local IT silliness they have. Technical considerations aside, the idea that they want to spy on their contractors is troubling and I'd get away from that situation as soon as possible. Unless they decide to pull back on these requests, it sounds like they'll be just be emboldened to micromanage even more.