How to downgrade to macOS Catalina after upgrading to Big Sur

> They very quickly (and I should add, nicely) contacted me and let me know that I needed to reinstall macOS Catalina as soon as possible.

Your security/IT team didn’t block the install via configuration management? Mine does!

While the entire article is helpful, for your situation you should have never written the article. Here is the correct response:

“I’m very sorry for installing Big Sur before it was approved! When can I bring my computer by to get this issue resolved?”

Because you the employee, who is the “customer” of the IT department, has taken ownership of the issue, security/IT has no incentive to prevent this problem from happening again.

This concept is the reason we put development teams on application on-call rotations instead of farming it out to infrastructure teams. If the source of the issues doesn’t own the issues, they will never go away.

Now imagine the security team giving these same instructions to someone on the marketing or sales team. That’s unacceptable. Employees aren’t and shouldn’t be responsible for maintaining their own systems’ patches and security updates, not in a larger company big enough to have a whole security/IT department.

E.g. I’d never instruct my parents to download an operating system and perform a clean install, and in the same way companies can’t assume technical abilities of their employees beyond their area of expertise.