Although there are some insanities with the IT situation at work, I have to say that I'm pretty pleased with one aspect: You can install your own OS, have admin

Although there are some insanities with the IT situation at work, I have to say that I'm pretty pleased with one aspect: You can install your own OS, have admin, install whatever software you want, just fill out the appropriate exception form online. They just won't support it--and for computer scientists and computer engineers like the people in my group, that's perfect. Other groups, with other types of scientists or support staff, get a corporate image. Now, there's some insanity with our network from time to time, but I deleted the big rant I wrote in favor of keeping the post positive about my employer. If you undervalue your IT department, you won't be able to get good people to stay. If good people won't stay, you end up with the bad ones--their solution is always to reboot or reformat, they don't know how to actually make reasonable changes to the environment so they just maintain the status quo. There's no IE9 upgrade plan at all, because they already know how to support IE6 and aren't willing to even look at IE9. Now everyone else hates the IT department, and if any good IT employee shows up, he's either going to run screaming from the interview, or stick it out for a few months before realizing all of his co-workers are idiots.