Well, I kinda like it -- less things to care about, more reason to leave at 5.

But it's counterproductive for the company, and some experiments a developer may want to quickly do will never be done at all. It kills a lot of creativity. The same holds, of course, for restricting internet access so a dev might never find out whether an interesting looking github tool really is good (for doing productive work!). Also, the company probably wants their products to run on a diverse zoo of machines and OS versions prior to release.

So why a company would take away such access on dev machines is a mystery to me -- probably misguided (and futile) attempts to keep in 'control'.