Honestly, it is just so much more complicated than a two paragraph post on hacker news. This is ridiculous. The title is awesome, like scientists just made some startling new discovery. Ridiculous!
Agreed, in manufacturing there are engineers that design the product (currently called developers) and there engineers that design the assembly line (currently called sysadmins).
When Toyota retools a factory, they don't have robots build/deploy the robots, there are engineers that "re-tool". This is exactly what is happening at Google/Facebook/Twitter, etc. There are maintenance guys, aka NOC monkeys, and there are engineers.
Eventually, everyone will need to be an engineer and that is where systems administration is going with the devops movement.