Earlier quoted context omitted.
No Engineer should have production access from their workstation. Period. source: am Engineer =).
Why not? (I think I can find some cases where production access from an engineer's workstation is a good idea)
In some industries, security and customer requirements will at times mandate that developer workstations have no access to production. Deployments must even be carried out using different accounts than those used to access internal services, for security and auditing purposes.
There are of course good reasons for this; accidents, malicious engineers, overzealous engineers, lost/stolen equipment, risk avoidance, etc.
When you apply this rule, it makes for more process and perhaps slower response times to problems, but accidents or other internal-related issues mentioned above drop to zero.
Given how easy it is to destroy things these days with a single misplaced Kubernetes or Docker command, safeguards need to be put in place.
Let me tell you a little story from my experience;
I built myself a custom keyboard from a Numpad kit. I had gotten tired of typing so many docker commands in every day and I had the desire to build something. I built this little numpad into a full blown Docker control centre using QMK. A single key-press could deploy or destroy entire systems.
One day, something slid off of something else on my desk, onto said keyboard, pressing several of the keys while I happened to have an SSH session to a remote server in focus.
Suffice it to say, that little keyboard has never been seen since. On an unrelated topic, I don't have SSH access to production systems.