It’s from ‘eating your own dog food’
I work in a small office (< 200 people) for a large (>>20,000) software company.
We get some standard OS selections with office products with some mandatory updates, but we can install other stuff (e.g., Chrome)
There is also an online market to get some software (e.g. SnagIt screen capture program) – I’ve never needed to get anything outside of that.
Hardware is a bit more complicated. You can order new computers but red tape is involved. If something breaks there is technically a user-hostile (user indifferent at best) web form to fill out. Most folks just email the local IT people and the IT people fill out the form.
We used to have some DB/unix admins in house, but that is now handled remotely (we have one person who helps out, and the IT folks can do some things if needed)
Brian
I’ve worked for several of the “super big” companies (the ones whose logos you would readily recognize). Generally speaking (in reference to the language issue), they required all employees to be “fluent” in Standard American English and had baselines in place for programming (I’m on the security side, so for us it was Minimum Security Baselines). You essentially built whatever you were developing off of an existing framework unless it was something completely new.
Completely new stuff had to go through a crap-load of project management, code review, pen testing, and nitpicking before getting pushed into even the “real” development environment. Then the testing environment. Then the user acceptance environment. And then, finally, production environment.
One of the firms that I worked for won the contract with Apple (we were a PC shop - like all of the major players). That meant that we had to deploy a few hundred professionals with MacBooks and such, but they still had to be able to play nicely with our environment. Procedural headaches were rampant, but… techies find shortcuts around everything.