I think there's a ton of value in people who are experts in systems and stay focused in that area, but I do see the importance of sys admins also being develope

I think there's a ton of value in people who are experts in systems and stay focused in that area, but I do see the importance of sys admins also being developers and having firsthand understanding of the developer perspective. On the other side of the coin, it's also very important that developers (particularly senior developers) have a healthy understanding of the full pipeline that brings code from their laptop to end-users. These two realms of software are yin and yang. How to best approach one depends on your approach to the other, and vice versa. If developers and sys admins don't have quite a lot of overlap, the goals that each are optimizing for can diverge pretty quickly. 'DevOps' seems to have emerged out of people's recognition of this problem. All that said, you could well be right that companies are overweighting development knowledge and underweighting the ops side. It's easy to end up with 'ops debt' that becomes crushing when developers put off dealing with it for too long.