It's like they don't realize that it's all software. Software that needs to do administrative tasks needs administrative permissions on the machine.

I really don't see how you can develop such software without having at least the ability to easily gain administrative permission on the machine.

It's not crazy to give you another PC or two.

Corporate IT can admin the box for corporate training PowerPoint gunk. You get another box to run what you have written, and maybe another to run the development environment. Those don't go on IT's network. You can run a private LAN around the office, not connected to the outside world, in which you break things as you please.

This solution is even good enough for people who are intentionally dealing with malware.

I was a dev in the 90s and the start of the 2000s and always had admin rights. I dont need it any more. If you really had an edge case that requires admin rights I'm surprised. If you really need SQL server on your workstation you should think about using a different database. If your company says you have to use SQL server and you have to have it on your workstation and you need to reinstall it regularly and you're obviously screwed you go up the management chain with your unsolvable problem that breaks their policy. Is very unusual now - most people just moan they want admin rights when they can live perfectly fine without it.

It will be really hard to argue for a complete redesign of a medical device app, complete retesting and waiting for FDA approval only because some guy at IT doesn’t like the devs to have admin.

You're basically saying, "I don't need admin rights anymore and can't think of reasons why anyone else would, so clearly you're wrong, don't know anything about your work, and don't need admin rights either".

A dose of humility might be in order.

Try running Visual Studio without admin rights and you will weep. Regarding other rights, I tried to onboard a new Dev without admin rights, however, after the 25th IT ticket (that take days to get done), I gave up.

I run Visual Studio without admin rights every day. But, if you're doing driver development, working with older IIS, certain parts of the registry or developing installers then yeah you're going to have a bad time.

Or try LabView. It’s not doable.

Visual Studio does not require admin rights to run at all. It stopped needing that almost ten years ago.

The only exceptions are some parts of the C++ debugger and the driver development kit.

or anything to do with Service Fabric.

I'm not sure if your "almost ten years ago" is meant to be hyperbolic, or genuine... I can't even remember why, but I know the project I was on 6 years ago definitely needed visual studio to have admin access, and it was all standard C# app stuff (maybe WPF?)