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I don't know what industry you are in or what kind of data your users entrust in you, but "just get a copy of prod" is not an idea that would EVER fly in any organisation I have worked in. Developers do not get access to production customers' financial records, medical data or PII, ever.

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Hands up, it's a fair point. I've worked with data sets that are mainly large aggregates of public data so security isn't an issue. It's the code that's carefully protected.

One exception is having access to that data because I was working ON the prod server. Read that again. It was deeply uncomfortable to work like this. Very worrying every day.

In those cases you have a set of test data that you use for development and testing. It's not like you can attach a Visual Studio debugger to production either.

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