I would rather work at a company with few rules than one where there is red tape around everything. For example, at my current company I don't even have root access on the machines I develop on, and I have to submit tickets to IT to get anything installed or changed. One time I asked them to install Docker and was met with suspicion. IT said they would investigate, and months later it is still is not installed.
I am currently a contractor//temp at a particular company. I am there to do particular work in order to support the real people doing their real jobs for The Company.
Often times I come against some form of permissions issue which prevents me from doing my job because of my non-real status. Because of red tape and nothing else I promise you, nothing about "but proprietary data" or anything like that. It may be root access to a specific computer, it may be casual access to a particular online processing system. "Oh, just go to the group github and... oh, you can't. Let me find a thumb drive and the latest release..." or "Can you access the group's shared data access website yet? ... but, we filed a bug about your access for this a few months ago, and still nothing? Are you sure? Can you try again and send me the error and cc IT?" ... and so on. Everyone's frustrated; I do what I can, push it up the chain, make the noise to maintain hope for improvement.
That's fine, but "no rules unless you mess up" is very different, because it forces you to basically try to second guess what a number of different managers will consider messing up.
Ask yourself why your current company has that rule, and consider if they could do it in a more practical way without making you guess. E.g. put dev servers on a separate network segment.
Stupid rules are worse than no rules, but if you join a place with stupid rules at least you know what you're going to. Because in reality there are rules in the "no rules" place too - they're just unwritten conventions you have to learn by trial and error.
Why do you feel like you need root access? In my experience, there are pretty much zero real reasons for a dev to need that level of access in a company that has an IT dept. IT may have good reasons not to let you mess around. If you want more access, I suggest you have a conversation with them and make a good business case for why it's a good thing. If you can't, then you probably don't need it and they would be right to deny it to you.
Because I'm a developer and I need to install things to develop. For whatever reason, the vast majority of windows packages require admin to install.
If you think it's great that I have to open a ticket to IT every time I want to update VSCode or install Python or Node or whatever, that's good for you, but I find it cumbersome and annoying and would rather work for a company that gives me root and trusts that I won't install viruses.
I read your previous comment as you wanting access to the servers that your code will run on. I'm guessing from the reference to VSCode that you're talking about your local work machine, so I apologise for my mistake and I agree, you should have trust from your company to look after your own work machine as you see fit.
Yes, my local work machine is completely locked down by corporate IT. They have a list of "pre-approved" things we can install like Chrome and Firefox and Notepad++, but everything else requires a ticket...
