Well, because it "used to be like that" and nothing is as persistent as a stopgap solution. Fun story: Used to work at a 8 year old, heavily growing ad network

Well, because it "used to be like that" and nothing is as persistent as a stopgap solution. Fun story: Used to work at a 8 year old, heavily growing ad network in customer support and hadn't even officially progressed to engineering yet, but people heard stories about my PHP hacking skills. So one of the old-timers came by (really fun and totally random guy) and was like... "ah, there's this one thing I thing you could help me, I'm trying to find a solution for these tracking error reports. wait, I'm giving you access" A few minutes later came my email together with password over MS Lync, and nothing else. And I waited for him to come by with some requirements. Which of course didn't happen. But what happened instead was that the newly minted Head of IT came by who was tasked of cleaning up the mess after the acquisition and introduce a proper process. He looked at me very earnestly and just when I tried to think hard what I did wrong he blurted out "WTF ARE YOU DOING WITH YOUR LIVE DB PRODUCTION CREDENTIALS!?" In the moment I realized what that guy gave me, it was gone already unfortunately. So long story short, as time goes by and companies grow, there are very different approaches at "getting things done" ;-)