As a junior noc analyst at a Fortune 500 company, I had root access to almost the entire corporate infrastructure from day one. Databases, front ends, provisioning tools, everything.
It's not about having access to the production database. It's about having an example script that can do catastrophic things and having the production username and password in the example docs.
I also had production access to everything from day one. The first thing I did was setup the hosts files in the various dev servers - including my own computer so I couldn't access the databases from them.
I have to remote into another computer to access them.
