That time is gone now.
Ad hoc access requests are chaos when handled manually. Slack pings, Jira tickets, random DMs—each one interrupts deep work. Granting, tracking, and revoking access is repetitive, risky, and hard to audit. Every minute spent here is a minute stolen from building features, fixing bugs, or shipping releases. Multiply that by a growing team, and the hours vanish fast.
Engineering hours saved start with removing friction. Access control should be instant, accurate, and temporary by default. Workflows must cover onboarding, escalations, and revocations without requiring ops teams to intervene. Audit trails must appear automatically, not as a separate chore.
Without automation, ad hoc access control scales linearly with headcount. That means more requests, more approvals, and more wasted engineering time. Worse, the human cost is invisible until delivery dates slip.