It goes both ways. At my old job, they took away local admin. But for some reason they configured visual studio to run as admin. So, I just wrote a little program that opens the shell. Whenever I needed admin, I just ran that program from Visual Studio.
Fair enough. Local admin is generally not something that I would want to restrict from people, especially those that are, or at least, should be, more knowledge than most.
I'll fight for that right for people most of the time.
Some users I would say should not have it, but generally developers are not those people. You know the ones.