This reminds me of somebody who held my job before I joined. He had questionable test/release/deployment practices, so they took his root privs away in prod, a

This reminds me of somebody who held my job before I joined. He had questionable test/release/deployment practices, so they took his root privs away in prod, and instead made him build packages (that was mostly already done before) and hand them to the admin team. Not to be deterred by useless administrative overhead, he added an environment variable where the application would look for code files, defaulting it to somewhere under /tmp. Then he could deploy his own hotfixes as a user. The company only found out when one of the two prod servers was rebooted, /tmp/ was wiped, and suddenly one of the two servers exhibited lots of old, already fixed bugs.