In my department I recruited DBAs as recent as last month and this is a permanent position filled by a team of several people that do just DBA work. I saw developers ("programmers") try to do this work in some small companies or in areas where the databases were small (hundreds of MB, a few GB), but I did not see that when the databases exceed 100 GB or when there are dozens of production SQL servers that need to run 24x7. Solutions are implemented based on needs.