Yep, working with admin rights. It's too restrictive otherwise. At times in the past I've worked without admin rights, but my small team ended up generating a higher support load than the rest of the org put together (not that we wanted to, we just needed stuff installed); so they just gave us admin rights ;) We actually went about 95% self-supported, we only got IT to help us with the networking stuff and ran our machines on clean installs instead of the SOE. Massive performance improvement for us, huge improvement on their support clearance stats, everyone was happy.

It's pretty common for dev teams to end up on a separate policy from the "business users" as their both their requirements and tech skills are so wildly different. Devs can take on more responsibility over their system than someone who lives in office software and needs to install stuff basically once in the life of their machine.

We are a small company of 10 people, and we all have admin rights on our workstations. We are also allowed to install any softwares we want, but we must take responsibility in case we mess something up. Last, we have mandatory applications to install, just so that anybody can find his/her way if they have to work on my machine (case of vacation etc...).

In such situations I always end up just asking for permission to run in a VM such as VirtualBox. It incurs a performance hit (often a nasty one) but at least then I can have a configuration with complete admin control that if I screw it up won't screw up the host machine.

As it is I usually have several VM's going at once just so I have things like testing environments for each different OS flavor and 1:1 copies of the servers my code will be deployed to so I'm not screwing around with live copies of anything.

Since "live editing" of codebases is meth-head levels of stupid. Make sure it works in a VM copy of the same environment, THEN deploy!

... so if you're going to need VM's anyways, might as well have a VM dev environment too for all those things they won't let you install native. Gives you a one-stop shop/fix to ask for without their having to give you admin rights on the host OS itself. Do whatever you like in the VM, you screw it up you aren't taking their stuff down with it.

Most every job I've had I've always had admin rights to my own machine, however, I did a stint at the US Department of Agriculture as a SharePoint developer, and since it was a government job, they were incredibly strict about security, and I didn't have admin rights. It was so incredibly frustrating, I had to wait two weeks to just get NotePad++ on my machine! After about 6 months, they finally gave it to me because they were sick of me asking to install the stuff I needed all the time :)

At Bosch CI, we do not have permanent admin rights on our workstations, however we can enable them temporarily with the press of a button (filling in a quick explanation why we need them). I think, that's very acceptable, but for my usual SE work, I would not need admin rights. Actually, I found ways to install most stuff which I needed admin rights for before without admin rights (for example by unpacking software to user directories and using the Windows Task Scheduler and scripts to operate them). Not running with elevated rights might even improve security :)

On servers, it depends on our tasks. I have to administrate a few servers, on which I do have admin rights, but usually, I don't if I only need to restart or upload things.

Depending on what you do, though, you might be in need of admin rights and if you feel like you can improve your efficiency by having them, you should talk to your manager.

On my own PC I have admin rights, on any servers (test, datase, file, deploy etc) I don't. Not allowed to install arbitrary software though (which is to say, I'm able to, but not allowed).