[vidarh]

Sometimes your problem turns out to be a problem with production hardware or wiring, or depending on interaction with external partners who may not be able to replicate their interactions accurately for your dev/test environment, or otherwise impossible for you to replicate in dev/testing without already having figured out what the problem is.

While I agree with your overall sentiment, in any kind of remotely complex environment you sooner or later come across problems that you have no sensible way of reproducing in dev, and which will require you to debug on a production environment without it saying anything about the quality of your development process.

[mattmanser]

Bollocks, even in complex environments you should be able to test it outside. You can hook dev machines up to external partners, so there's absolutely no good reason to be using live environments for those problems.

I have seen production hardware or wiring be the problem once in my entire career. And I used to work for a company that ran and supported enterprise software on hundreds of different client-owned servers.

Most people these days will be running a few web servers at most.

EDIT: Worse still, we're talking about debugging javascript here, which makes what you're saying even more preposterous. Wiring, indeed.