> In all my years of writing tools for other devs

Not just tools for devs, this is true in a lot of cases.

I used to work at Fortinet and every now and then we'd get an e-mail from information services letting us know that they would be installing a dev build of FortiOS on our internal (production) corporate network.

In cases where we needed more debug logging from a feature or where we had a fix we had to test on a live network, and if we didn't want to ship a test firmware to some huge client and say 'here, see if this bricks your network or not', they would hand it off to our IT team and we'd install it on our own network to run. After all, if you're not confident enough to run it how can you be confident enough to ask your customers to run it?

Now if they could just get the hang of not hard-coding admin credentials into the software they'd have a lot to brag about!