It is an interesting line of thinking. Way too many startups I've been involved with/talked to have over looked the role of admins/an ops team. The mentality seems to be that developers should also focus as admins/ops. Surely nothing will go wrong on a weekend after a developer has already put in an 80 hour week, right?
From my experience, sys admins are important. If you are doing anything of scale, knowledge on how to setup, tweak, and debug systems is critical. It is helpful if the admins can stretch a bit into the app layer, just as it is helpful for developers to be able to stretch a bit into the systems layer, problems come up and knowledge of the parts helps.
As an engineer that can also setup systems for scale, I know my limits and really appreciate help from and learning things from good sysadmins.
From my experience, sys admins are important. If you are doing anything of scale, knowledge on how to setup, tweak, and debug systems is critical. It is helpful if the admins can stretch a bit into the app layer, just as it is helpful for developers to be able to stretch a bit into the systems layer, problems come up and knowledge of the parts helps.
As an engineer that can also setup systems for scale, I know my limits and really appreciate help from and learning things from good sysadmins.