To me, the converse is a lot scarier: what if I, feeling no personal responsibility for yield, wasn't there after-hours looking for bugs in the first place? Or what if I did find the critical bug, but had to wait weeks for forms before it was pushed through? Or was blocked by office politics?
There's nothing more disheartening as having a fix for something serious that you can't push through. I've worked at companies like that: taking away the power to break something means taking away the power to make it better.
Not to say that I somehow dislike code reviews or generally fly by the seat of my pants: the situation really was a real emergency. I can't talk specifics, but the bug had already cost more than the damage it would do to if I broke something.
It seems to work for them...
> production line during an emergency. If something went
> wrong, chips would actually stop rolling out of the factory.
While I'm all for letting engineers react to things progressively, that you were in position where a screw up could have shut down a fab as an intern is nothing short of terrifying to me.