This comment is more about learning to "clean your room" (God I hate where this originates, but it's extremely relevant here). I know architect level people who will not manage their own hardware, and will insist that other people (who have better things to do BTW) set their hardware up for them. They won't ask IT people either - they will ask Junior Engineers. This also has a lot to do with bettering your own tooling. If you're using 10 year old hardware, you're likely also using 10 year old software, and 10 year old design techniques making you a weaker IC and making it so progress slows down for not only you but your entire org.

If this is acceptable to you and your org, that's fine by me, but it's not acceptable to me, and I practice something called "Taking ownership" where if there's a need for improvement (and there is always need for improvement), I make the improvement and then try and champion it to my coworkers. My coworkers also hate me for it, because I'm interested in pushing new processes when they are fine with what they know.

Man tangent time sorry,

One of the latest processes I am pushing is that we adopt newer CI/CD techniques through Gitlab CI and Proxmox vs using "the same old tooling" we've used for a decade with Jenkins and ESXi (Not even ESXi 7 either - we're still on 6). I've gotten a grand total of 3 people (2 of those are my direct bosses so that's all that matteres) bought in, but progress is always slow. I do expect that some Engineers will be "stuck in their ways" for at least another year as I build the platform up.

Anyways, why am I rambling about this? Obviously it is a hell of a lot easier to adopt ownership if you're in the position where you can define processes (like I am) but there's nothing stopping an IC from making suggestions to improve processes. What I find in my experience is that ICs simply are unaware that they can do this, or just don't want to do this and that's discouraging to me, but I'm not at all surprised because people don't take that kind of ownership easily.

Here at my org, work dedicates hardware to engineers (on prem, we have our own data center and are 100% WFH) but it's the engineer's responsibility to allocate resources to themselves. What happens is that basically everyone end up using the same decaying ESXi cluster, without consideration that they could just ask for a dedicated machine (we have plenty of these) so that don't have to share resources with our QA team that has a combined ~200 VMs they're constantly running and that's on top of our CI/CD which is dozens of VMs. Completely apathetic towards the idea that their days could be easier if they just allocated hardware to themselves like I have for years (and I also have my home system I run stuff on as we don't have a policy on this).