here's how company culture dies without much effort imagine you have a team of three- there's little process and it's a high trust environment mistakes are made but everyone has high levels of ownership so they clean it up and learn the lesson now imagine you grow to 12 people - still pretty small but you have subteams that form one day, someone on the team accidentally runs a sql query in production they meant for dev and deletes things this disrupts everyone's work and whoever is most capable has to stop what they're doing to fix it it wouldn't feel right to do nothing and pretend like it never happened so people suggest limiting prod access to fewer people of course that makes sense, every other company does it so you implement it this tiny change has big impacts - everything is made a bit more bureaucratic: - whenever there's a change, you have to ask your manager to assist you - if you're curious about how users are using the app, you have to ask someone to run a query - if there's a bug you waste time seeing if you can fix it without prod access before bothering someone these little frictions make it so people do all of these things less, feel less ownership, and foster a sense of "not my problem" and there's no solution once you're at this point - it's why people always long for "the magic of the early days" and it's all because of one mistake one person made one time