I had an inverted experience like this at my job. My job title is Technical Support. I do internal and external support for our company. We use Salesforce. By sheer luck I convinced my boss to allot me full system admin access to our Salesforce instance. I've gone to town improving our customer support workflow for our 100+ phone and e-mail reps by creating small tools and tweaks using Apex/VF Pages among other things.

I had no prior experience with Salesforce when I first requested access. I'm no Salesforce Architect, but I have a great grasp on the internals of it now all because my boss had a little faith in me.