So far, so good.
The issue was that the “sysadmins” knew almost nothing about how anything worked, so the procedure was that the devs would give them commands to type and they would just type them in to a terminal.
Of course, if anything went wrong, or was ambiguous, the dev would need to check on it, and would end up standing next to the “sysadmin”’s desk and just telling them which characters to type. I once had to explain what a pipe character was...
Anyway, the end result was that all of the devs had prod access, they just had a very slow interface to it.
