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I'm also a programmer, and agree completely - I think devs should have admin rights on their boxes, and at the very least access to VMs for testing Ultimately,
by oz 15y ago
I'm also a programmer, and agree completely - I think devs should have admin rights on their boxes, and at the very least access to VMs for testing
Ultimately, it's an issue of trade-offs: I guarantee that since you're allowed to go wild on your machine, the IT cost to support devs is higher. It's not right or wrong, simply a matter of trade-offs. It's up to an individual organization to determine an acceptable trade-off.
Edit: Grammar
- mkopinsky 15y agoOTOH, the IT cost to support competent users is lower, since they don't come crying to you every time the printer needs paper. In the scheme of things, I wonder which effect predominates.
- bdunbar 15y agoI think devs should have admin rights on their boxes I no longer support dev desktops, but I do admin the systems they use - servers, databases. I'm cool with what you say in principle. If we're talking your own desktop, sure, no problem. As long as you're responsible for cleaning up your own mess. But root on 'my' dev servers - no way, Jose. Those guys don't know unix, don't know what they're doing with root. They get shell accounts, they can do what they need to do. Maybe it's the way we're setup. Typically 'the' box they're using is shared with other devs and applications. One fubared 'rm' as root and they've taken down great chunks of our development environment.
- oz 15y agoThat's why I preach VMs. They can go wild on those - just teach them how to create and revert to snapshots. They'll love you forever :)
- bdunbar 15y agoI use VMs myself - invaluable for the stuff I've done with RoR. One problem with VMs is they would not work very well with the dev environments I support: JDE and ancillary applications.