There were a couple "not prod" environments, but they were either replicated directly from prod or so poorly maintained that they were unusable (empty tables, w

There were a couple "not prod" environments, but they were either replicated directly from prod or so poorly maintained that they were unusable (empty tables, wrong schemas, off by multiple DB major versions, etc), no middle ground. So institutional culture was to just run everything against prod (for bare selects that could be copied and pasted into the textbox in the prod-access web tool) or a prod replica (for anything that needed a db connection). The training docs actually did specify Real Production, and first-week tasks included gaining Real Production access. If I walked in and was handed that training documentation today I'd raise hell and/or quit on the spot, but that was my first job out of college - it was basically everyone's first job out of college, they strongly preferred hiring new graduates - and I'd just had to give up on my PhD so I didn't have the confidence, energy, or pull to do anything about it, even bail out. That was also the company where prod pushes happened once a month, over the weekend, and were all hands on deck in case of hiccups. It was an extraordinarily strong lesson in how not to organize software development. (edit: if what you're really asking is "did every engineer have write access to production", the answer was, I believe, that only managers did, and they were at least not totally careless with it. not, like, actually responsible, no "formal post-mortem for why we had to use break-glass access", but it generally only got brought out to unbreak prod pushes. Still miserable.)