title: what should developers have access to?
body: <p>i work at a place where we build applications that process and store sensitive data. 
  we have 3 environments. Dev, UAT / QA (user acceptant testing) and Production</p>
  
  <p>the developers at my work have no access to UAT or Production and have limited access to Dev. All we can do in dev is connect to a dev DB server . we have no access to the dev server itself. so we arent allowed to play with things like the web server (iis)  on dev.  if we want changes we must go though a formal process of submitting work requests to our network administrators (which could takes days to complete). 
  the same goes if a developer were to request for something to be checked in a UAT or PRod database.
  this strict access restriction is really frustrating when trying to support our applications.</p>
  
  <p>i can understand why we have these policies, as it reduces the risk of things getting screwed up. but this makes solving issues really time consuming and painful. something that could take 5 mins to fix (if a developer had access) could take days to resolve. </p>
  
  <p>is this sort of strict access rights normal?</p>