> sometimes a beer or pizza with someone high up at IT gets you much further than barking. We all live in a society with other people.

That's true, but it gets tricky in a large multinational, when the rules are set by some team in a different country, whose responsibilities are to the corporate HQ, and the IT department of the merged-in company I worked for has zero authority on the issue. I tried, I've also sent tickets up the chain, they all got politely ignored.

From the POV of all the regular employees, it looks like this: there are some annoying restrictions here and there, and you learn how to navigate the CPU-eating AV scans; you adapt and learn how to do your work. Then one day, some sneaky group policy update kills one of your workarounds and you notice this by observing that compilation takes 5x as long as it used to, and git operations take 20x as long as they should. You find a way to deal (goodbye small commits). Then one day, you get an e-mail from corporate IT saying that they just partnered with ESET or CrowdStrike or ZScaler or not, and they'll be deploying the new software to everyone. Then they do, and everything goes to shit, and you need to start to triple every estimate from now on, as the new software noticeably slows down everything across the board. You think to yourself, at least corporate gave you top-of-the-line laptops with powerful CPUs and absurd amount of RAM; too bad for sales and managers who are likely using much weaker machines. And then you realize that sales and management were doing half their work in random third-party SaaS, and there is an ongoing process to reluctantly in-house some of the shadow IT that's been going on.

Fortunately for me, in my various corporate jobs, I've always managed to cope by using Ubuntu VMs or (later) WSL2, and that this always managed to stay "in the clear" with company security rules. Even if it meant I had to figure out some nasty hacks to operate Windows compilers from inside Linux, or to stop the newest and bestest corporate VPN from blackholing all network traffic to/from WSL2 (was worth it, at least my work wasn't disrupted by the Docker Desktop licensing fiasco...). I never had to use personal devices, and I learned long ago to keep firm separation between private and work hardware, but for many people, this is a fuzzy boundary.

There was one job where corporate installed a blatant keylogger on everyones' machines, and for a while, with our office IT's and our manager's blessing, our team managed to stave it off - and keep local admin rights - by conveniently forgetting to sign relevant consent forms. The bad taste this left was a major factor in me quitting that job few months later, though.

Anyway, the point to these stories is, I've experienced first-hand how security in medium and large enterprises impacts day-to-day work. I fought both alongside and against IT departments over these. I know that most of the time, from the corporate HQ's perspective, it's difficult to quantify the impact of various security practices on everyone's day-to-day work (and I briefly worked in cybersecurity, so I also know this isn't even obvious to people this should be considered!). I also know that large organizations can eat a lot of inefficiency without noticing it, because at that size, they have huge inertia. The corporate may not notice the work slowing down 2x across the board, when it's still completing million-dollar contracts on time (negotiated accordingly). It just really sucks to work in this environment; the inefficiency has a way of touching your soul.

EDIT:

The worst is the learned helplessness. One day, you get fed up with Git taking 2+ minutes to make a goddamn commit, and you whine a bit on the team channel. You hope someone will point out you're just stupid and holding it wrong, but no - you get couple people saying "yeah, that's how it is", and one saying "yeah, I tried to get IT to fix that; they told me a cooling stand for the laptop should speed things a bit". You eventually learn that security people just don't care, or can't care, and you can only try to survive it.

(And then you go through several mandatory cybersecurity trainings, and then you discover a dumb SQL injection bug in a new flagship project after 2 hours of playing with it, and start questioning your own sanity.)