At my current job, we aim for a new employee to push to prod on day one not because we want the employee to begin churning out valuable work immediately, but because we want them to quickly become familiar and comfortable with the development, QA, & deployment workflows and tools.
The ticket that gets deployed is often as simple as a typo fix or a small CSS tweak, just to illustrate the whole process. The risk of deploying to prod isn't zero, but since we deploy many times a week already, the risk of deploying a typo fix is pretty low to us.
It also serves as a test for the existing employees: ideally those workflows are smooth enough that it all Just Works on a freshly-set-up environment and account, and we are comfortable enough with our rollback strategy that (after reviewing and testing) we are not afraid of merging in and deploying our new employees' code.
The ticket that gets deployed is often as simple as a typo fix or a small CSS tweak, just to illustrate the whole process. The risk of deploying to prod isn't zero, but since we deploy many times a week already, the risk of deploying a typo fix is pretty low to us.
It also serves as a test for the existing employees: ideally those workflows are smooth enough that it all Just Works on a freshly-set-up environment and account, and we are comfortable enough with our rollback strategy that (after reviewing and testing) we are not afraid of merging in and deploying our new employees' code.