Ask HN: Big software teams, how do you manage your computers?

If there is a pattern, yes. Nothing I do comes remotely close to accidentally installing malware. If they install malware it is probably because they are using their work-owned computer as their personal computer. If they are doing that they are doing something not very smart and they are probably making many other workplace mistakes.

Yes. BigCorp have very limited access to resources depending on their role. IF you need to install software OR require admin rights your ticket have to pass long tail of approvals with lots of justification.

This. I think people were too quick to judge the OP as an idiot. He's not talking about your applications. He's talking about physical developer hardware. The laptop sitting in front of you.

Nope.

Normally in a centralized system you would hook up CI/CD processes to dedicated infrastructure, so that when developers commit to your RCS/VCS server (github, gitlab, whatever else), builds and tests are automatically run.

This infrastructure may be a dedicated system, a cluster, or outsourced infrastructure (real or virtual).

Because git (or any other RCS/VCS) is a well defined formal interface between the developer and the rest of the development-related business processes (automated or otherwise), it means individual machines can just be user managed, which developers tend to prefer.

It's worth mentioning that there is a school of thought that builds or tests that take longer than a few seconds on a developer's machine are undesirable from a workflow optimization perspective and may be indicative of a non continuous delivery (CD) capable codebase, with probable features such as knowledge silos ("only that guy knows"), undeployability, low quality, lack of project visibility, infrastructure tie-in and late defect discovery.