Greentext

My previous employer was bought by a huge company. I liked it in the small company, because I had freedom to do what was needed without much questions, and I was trusted to make the relevant decisions and purchases. Kind of a "Costs be damned, get it done in a reasonable amount of time" kind of arrangement.

When we came under the big corpo, we got an email instructing us to list all the software we used/needed, so that it could be added to the whitelist that big corpo worked with. Anything not in the whitelist simply couldn't run.

I gave them the list, but spoke to my on-shore It guy that out in the field we often needed to install something that we didn't need before on short notice, and waiting for a ticket to be resolved for an administrative matter had the potential to stop production.

They found it easier just to make an exception for my work PC. I just had to promise not to VPN in to the office while running "weird" stuff, otherwise the higher ups would get upset.

That's fine. I had my own VPN for only the stuff I needed anyway. I VPNed into offshore production systems on a daily basis. I needed to VPN I to the office once or twice. Plus in my book, the "main" VPN client is what I consider weird software. My shit was basically a wrapper around openvpn.

EDIT: To be fair, the huge corpo employer wasn't unreasonable. It was just so large with so many employees that strct security implementations were needed for IT to have some sort of control. I was technically also IT, but I only dealt with field equipment, so that IT could focus on "normal" stuff. They trusted me to handle my end, they handled theirs, and we usually cooperated fairly well when our systems "met".