It's not theater, your IT department just isn't implementing it correctly. I recently switched jobs and gave up one macbook pro for another (work issued).
Company A gave me sudo access and I could do anything I wanted.
Company B locks down everything, no sudo, no brew, nothing. But I do get a big VM with root to do anything I want. There is an approved "appstore" of many different varieties of IDEs/tools.
TLDR: Not having brew is not a problem, and /can be/ a better experience if done right.
It took a couple weeks to shift the mental model but I have no problems. The dev experience is quite good because they provide all the libraries you need to do your job.
Interesting. If you don't mind, I have a few questions:
1. Is the "big VM with root" running macOS itself, or a different OS?
2. Do you do any work on the bare metal version of macOS, or do you just start the VM in the morning and do everything from there?
3. How do you experience the performance/UX of the VM?
4. Do you know why Company B IT has set up this VM solution, instead of a plain old MacBook locked down with Apple's enterprise management tools?
5. Can you explain more about the App Store? Is it the actual Apple App Store but restricted to a curated set of apps, or is it a different system? If so, is the store a custom in-house thing or is it provided by a vendor?
It's funny because some 25 years ago we did the exact opposite. Corporate IT insisted on some Windows software, so we each ran a Windows VM that the corporate could pretend to remote manage.
(This was at a branch office where every employee worked on very low-level Linux kernel code, so yeah everyone ran their favorite Linux distro.)
Company A gave me sudo access and I could do anything I wanted.
Company B locks down everything, no sudo, no brew, nothing. But I do get a big VM with root to do anything I want. There is an approved "appstore" of many different varieties of IDEs/tools.
TLDR: Not having brew is not a problem, and /can be/ a better experience if done right.
It took a couple weeks to shift the mental model but I have no problems. The dev experience is quite good because they provide all the libraries you need to do your job.