Production Access Denied Who caused this rule anyways?

This rule is actually a good thing and it's just that the smaller teams haven't learned it yet. Even with companies like Etsy, which practice Dev-Ops almost at a religious level, there are controls to make sure code is tested before it's released.

Note that I'm not saying developers shouldn't be given access to production data (or at least a reasonable facsimile). I'd recommend reading Evolutionary Database Design (http://martinfowler.com/articles/evodb.html) for some ideas on techniques to have the best of both worlds.

Unless developers double as deployment gnomes or devops devoperators, they have no need to be on the production servers if they are not actively engaged in debugging a production issue that does not manifest on the dev or other) tier.

I personally find that if something goes wrong, the blame gang goes searching for developer that obviously broke it.

I was once publishing new web content via FTP to an IIS server when there was a disruption in mainframe connectivity to our data center. I was asked by more than one manager, in earnest, why and how I broke the 3270 connectivity. Note: I had no mainframe access at all, none, nada, zilch, zip.

IT's much easier to say "I don't have access to that machine, sorry."