I've worked in multiple sectors for nearly 2 decades: government, energy, transport, retail, finance and software. So I've got a pretty good read on what is a normal level of access.
Very small companies and start ups I'd agree often don't have this kind of separation. But if they grow into one of the worlds biggest brands, I would not expect it to be run like a 50 man startup.
Eh, this kind of change usually needs something to go wrong before something is done. Lots of people get outraged when you take privileges from them, even if they probably never should've gotten them to begin with.
It's also easy to loose track of your own bias. There is a strong selection bias in employment which makes it look as if all workplaces are similar, simply because a company is more likely to hire you if you've worked in a similarly run one before.
> For example, half the company had prod access to user accounts. And there was no way to find out who accessed what. This is not normal, it's a huge red flag.
If that statement was qualified to only include fortune 500 companies I would've agreed with it being a red flag
Yes, the "that's not normal" made it quiet explicitly about the state of the industry in order to single out Twitter to be exceptionally bad in this regard. Which is true in the context of well run companies, but not on the average.
The exceptionally bad ones have no authentication on databases readable to dog-and-world. That's the state of our industry where security is at best an afterthought. By that measure, Twitter is basically average. They give it some lip service and do as little as they can get away with.
Very small companies and start ups I'd agree often don't have this kind of separation. But if they grow into one of the worlds biggest brands, I would not expect it to be run like a 50 man startup.