I can believe that!
We're in the process of upgrading (and relocating) our datacenter, and are planning on some fairly beefy systems that are going to be partitioned out via VMware. We're going to be telling our developers as little as we can get away with.
As a developer I can tell you that may come back to bite you later, especially if you're dealing with system timings or drivers. You are safer if they're only writing high-level stuff, but there's still no guarantee.