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Further to the discussion of list and subjective questions, here's something I was going to ask, but have been trying to figure out how to make it "good subjective." (There was also a discussion today on meta.SO about list questions.)

What strategies can be used to minimize problems when you (the SysAdmin) don't have as much control of PCs as you would like?

There are a variety of situations where users insist on having more control of their own systems than the sysadmins want them to have. For example:

• President or other company bigwig insists on having admin access
• Developers want admin access to their own PCs
• Mission-critical apps need elevated privileges, unusual network configuration, or run on non-standard hardware or software
• and so on...

When faced with an absolute business requirement to support something non-standard and (often) sub-optimal, what strategies can be used to minimize the negative impacts?

It seems to me that there are lots of potential good subjective questions that have the same features:

• There's no single "correct" or best answer
• But there probably aren't too many good answers... For my example question, I expect there might be up to a dozen strategies that lots of us would agree are useful.
• Answers don't have to be specific. The problem with questions that are looking for specific "use tool ABC" recommendations is that tools change over time. But a question asking for techniques or approaches is more likely to be useful in the future.

An obvious problem with this type of question is drawing the line on how many useful answers are likely. Maybe I think there are only a few strategies, but I could be wrong, maybe there are hundreds of useful techniques and the question will be useless because they'll all be muddled together with no useful structure.

So: Is my example question "good subjective?" Are questions like it allowed, or are they Not Constructive?

ANNOYING INLINE EDIT #1: My example question appears to be a duplicate, but what about the general question: is it good subjective to ask for strategies and techniques for dealing with a problem?

Further to the discussion of list and subjective questions, here's something I was going to ask, but have been trying to figure out how to make it "good subjective." (There was also a discussion today on meta.SO about list questions.)

What strategies can be used to minimize problems when you (the SysAdmin) don't have as much control of PCs as you would like?

There are a variety of situations where users insist on having more control of their own systems than the sysadmins want them to have. For example:

• President or other company bigwig insists on having admin access
• Developers want admin access to their own PCs
• Mission-critical apps need elevated privileges, unusual network configuration, or run on non-standard hardware or software
• and so on...

When faced with an absolute business requirement to support something non-standard and (often) sub-optimal, what strategies can be used to minimize the negative impacts?

It seems to me that there are lots of potential good subjective questions that have the same features:

• There's no single "correct" or best answer
• But there probably aren't too many good answers... For my example question, I expect there might be up to a dozen strategies that lots of us would agree are useful.
• Answers don't have to be specific. The problem with questions that are looking for specific "use tool ABC" recommendations is that tools change over time. But a question asking for techniques or approaches is more likely to be useful in the future.

An obvious problem with this type of question is drawing the line on how many useful answers are likely. Maybe I think there are only a few strategies, but I could be wrong, maybe there are hundreds of useful techniques and the question will be useless because they'll all be muddled together with no useful structure.

So: Is my example question "good subjective?" Are questions like it allowed, or are they Not Constructive?

ANNOYING INLINE EDIT #1: My example question appears to be a duplicate, but what about the general question: is it good subjective to ask for strategies and techniques for dealing with a problem?

Further to the discussion of list and subjective questions, here's something I was going to ask, but have been trying to figure out how to make it "good subjective." (There was also a discussion today on meta.SO about list questions.)

What strategies can be used to minimize problems when you (the SysAdmin) don't have as much control of PCs as you would like?

There are a variety of situations where users insist on having more control of their own systems than the sysadmins want them to have. For example:

• President or other company bigwig insists on having admin access
• Developers want admin access to their own PCs
• Mission-critical apps need elevated privileges, unusual network configuration, or run on non-standard hardware or software
• and so on...

When faced with an absolute business requirement to support something non-standard and (often) sub-optimal, what strategies can be used to minimize the negative impacts?

It seems to me that there are lots of potential good subjective questions that have the same features:

• There's no single "correct" or best answer
• But there probably aren't too many good answers... For my example question, I expect there might be up to a dozen strategies that lots of us would agree are useful.
• Answers don't have to be specific. The problem with questions that are looking for specific "use tool ABC" recommendations is that tools change over time. But a question asking for techniques or approaches is more likely to be useful in the future.

An obvious problem with this type of question is drawing the line on how many useful answers are likely. Maybe I think there are only a few strategies, but I could be wrong, maybe there are hundreds of useful techniques and the question will be useless because they'll all be muddled together with no useful structure.

So: Is my example question "good subjective?" Are questions like it allowed, or are they Not Constructive?

ANNOYING INLINE EDIT #1: My example question appears to be a duplicate, but what about the general question: is it good subjective to ask for strategies and techniques for dealing with a problem?

Further to the discussion of list and subjective questions, here's something I was going to ask, but have been trying to figure out how to make it "good subjective." (There was also a discussion today on meta.SO about list questions.)

What strategies can be used to minimize problems when you (the SysAdmin) don't have as much control of PCs as you would like?

There are a variety of situations where users insist on having more control of their own systems than the sysadmins want them to have. For example:

• President or other company bigwig insists on having admin access
• Developers want admin access to their own PCs
• Mission-critical apps need elevated privileges, unusual network configuration, or run on non-standard hardware or software
• and so on...

When faced with an absolute business requirement to support something non-standard and (often) sub-optimal, what strategies can be used to minimize the negative impacts?

It seems to me that there are lots of potential good subjective questions that have the same features:

• There's no single "correct" or best answer
• But there probably aren't too many good answers... For my example question, I expect there might be up to a dozen strategies that lots of us would agree are useful.
• Answers don't have to be specific. The problem with questions that are looking for specific "use tool ABC" recommendations is that tools change over time. But a question asking for techniques or approaches is more likely to be useful in the future.

An obvious problem with this type of question is drawing the line on how many useful answers are likely. Maybe I think there are only a few strategies, but I could be wrong, maybe there are hundreds of useful techniques and the question will be useless because they'll all be muddled together with no useful structure.

So: Is my example question "good subjective?" Are questions like it allowed, or are they Not Constructive?

ANNOYING INLINE EDIT #1: My example question appears to be a duplicate, but what about the general question: is it good subjective to ask for strategies and techniques for dealing with a problem?