I'm a programmer by profession, with some admin experience, and I couldn't disagree more.

It's entirely possible to write code in ways that make it really difficult to backup or scale and it's your job to avoid this and any other gotchas.

An obvious example, would be taking a binary copy of a database as a backup means. I've seen this a ton of times, though most good admins know there are better ways to back them up. How do they know this? I'd hazard a guess because the programmers were aware of the problem, documented it, and wrote the tools to get around the issue.

I imagine you really meant to say "I don't want to manage...", which is fair enough as long as someone else is doing it. :)