Generally “programmer” type folks are only power users in the context of software, possibly even only the software they wrote or tooling they chose.
Nope.
Engineers and programmers are the most-likely source of "I know what I'm doing so I can run it this way" and you end up with things like NFS running on systems that haven't been bounced in over 300 days and can't be updated because someone used sudo to break yum.
No one gets admin unless they explicitly need it. Period. Because while you may actually know what you're doing, most programmers haven't the slightest inkling about safe computing practices, based on experience.
Every instance I've encountered with an engineer having root/admin permissions has been a shitshow.
I just now encountered an instance of engineers bypassing policy by modifying sudoers to give a lower priv'd generic/shared account passwordless sudo to shit like /usr/bin/make.
The other project I was on, I had to fight with engineers about why having a firewall on your appliance doesn't negate the need to address code execution exploits behind the firewall. These aren't security-savy individuals and they shouldn't ever be given administrative access to anything.
I'm glad you don't work for me, too; I can't stand leadership positions. I work in security and all I see are engineers fucking up daily, so I'm pretty jaded/biased at this point.
No one gets the benefit of the doubt, and certainly not programmers. You get more leeway with what we'll allow, but not free reign. Most programmers aren't HN level.
Oh boy, the self importance here is hilarious
There’s also a reading of that response where they mean “HN level” like “as confident as the replied-to comment author”. Could even be a bit sarcastic.
Someone with the attitude of “it’s my job [to not mess up]” will mess up subtly, try to fix the problem, and not mention it to IT.
As annoying as IT can be, one of those options is a lot better for operational security.