If this is BS, then that relieves me. This is what a trustworthy acquaintance who is an engineer at Facebook told me. As onedev said below, all access is logged and changes can be rolled back. Engineers use live user data for their local development and testing. But maybe this level of access is limited to certain feature teams.
That's what a Facebook employee told me last month.
For similar stories: Katherine Losse, Facebook employee #51, wrote a biography [1] that includes details about early days when the master password was "Chuck Norris". And this 2010 interview [2] with an "anonymous Facebook employee" (for what that's worth :) also describes how engineers can access user data.
I've been given root access to a handful of internal servers as an intern at some companies in the past, but never database servers or production, customer-facing servers. That seems rather ridiculous.
If you set out to hire great engineers and have the resources and reputation, it can be done. Definitely a good choice over MBA types, but it seems to me that Facebook could stand to diversify their employees as Facebook is a mass market product and engineers often don't see the social world or the internet as the average person perceives it.
