[cmdkeen]

Being punchy about it you've never moved on from thinking you need admin rights on your machine. Chocolatey for Business' self-service installer, SCCM jobs, and a variety of other tools exist to enable you to get specific things that require elevation executed. If you're changing things to test various configurations wouldn't it be handy to have those scripted, get them peer reviewed / linted and you've got yourself the start of a process to get that script executed on demand.

This stuff isn't that hard - but those of us doing it see the mad things that people do when they're given blanket, even time bound, admin access. They're the ones dealing with the support calls when then every SQL Server installation has been done differently with no details of what specifically was done. IaC works.

[novok]

Then I hit another 'no-admin' roadblock, that requires a day or weeks of hostile IT bureaucracy and the IT department has just wasted another +$3000 of employee time. This behavior might drive them to quit, leading to a premature +$30k recruiting and on ramping cost to replace them.

Now iterate that over 1000s of other instances and you see the financial reason why devs need admin.

[maxxxxx]

Have you ever considered that some people are themselves writing tools like Chocolatey that inherently need elevated rights? I am working on a Windows service that needs to be elevated to work. In addition I need to change TPM keys and change registry settings in the machine hive. The SQL Server installation is local and IT will never be bothered with it. Just let me install it.