[jameszhang]

I really disagree with this. For your first hire, a full time sysadmin who cannot work on developing the product itself is just as useless as hiring a developer who cannot ship the code.

I think what this article is trying to get at is that your fire hire should be a full-stack engineer who can also play the DevOps role when needed.

[throughnothing]

I think saying a sysadmin 'cannot work on developing the product itself', is silly. I think it's a given that anyone joining at such an early stage of a company is going to be developing the product. You will definitely need a sysadmin that can develop the product and move fast. Your architecture is part of the product, and the sysadmin should help with the design and implementation of the architecture, as well as possibly parts of the codebase going onto that architecture.