It is a mix of ignorance, control, fear, and compliance. In finance in particular, insider threats are a real thing and it leads to the exact kinds of situations you’re describing. The cognitive dissonance of trusting someone enough to pay them a salary and deploy code to production (after peer verification), but not trusting them enough to manually touch a database is real. And it is the result of mitigating company risks, and following laws and regulations. No, it doesn’t make any sense. Yes, it should all be aligned, but you know, humans. All of that said, sometimes people do dumb things unintentionally, and the controls are there to mitigate those instances, too. Ultimately, you just deal with the bullshit because fighting it does no one any good. The powers that be only care about making money. And if you, peon developer, need to jump through a bunch of bullshit hoops in order to do your job, management doesn’t give a shit. That is what they are paying you for, after all.