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.