In the Unix/Linux world, a lot of the Sys Admins I've met have been very strong technically. Knew at least a scripting language and basic C programming. The trend however has been for less and less coding skills and more superficial. Sometimes not even any shell scripting skills.
In the Windows world, a lot of the Sys Admins do not have those skills. It's changing, things like PowerShell and various others are helping, but a lot of Windows Admin are just not that comfortable away from the GUI. I think the comment you refer to is by someone with a Windows dev background. GUIs don't version...
The mainframe world folks tended to be very silo'd (and IBM engineers were never far to hold hands.)
In the Windows world, a lot of the Sys Admins do not have those skills. It's changing, things like PowerShell and various others are helping, but a lot of Windows Admin are just not that comfortable away from the GUI. I think the comment you refer to is by someone with a Windows dev background. GUIs don't version...
The mainframe world folks tended to be very silo'd (and IBM engineers were never far to hold hands.)