> we were keeping many millions of dollars of daily transactions afloat and it was not unusual to receive death threats from business folks when they couldn't do their jobs
That's crazy. My team works on a part of a system handling several million $/day, and if something goes wrong then everyone's chill about it. Lost $100k revenue? Happens. We'll have the comms team send out something about it. The most heated things got was a time that a manager said something along the lines of "yeah it'll be bad if we can't roll out this thing in the next 2 hours." If I got a death threat that's an instant email to HR.
It worked exceptionally well because then the other employees were unable to individually bother team members. The team name in the HR directory was something vague and reported to the skip level, so unless you were in the know, we were totally invisible to the rest of the org. For some context we were keeping many millions of dollars of daily transactions afloat and it was not unusual to receive death threats from business folks when they couldn't do their jobs.
I don't miss it remotely, but I sometimes miss being a member of an invisible force with superuser privileges, with the blessing to unfuck anything we saw fit.