That's exactly what my previous company tried to do with their development team.

It caused the dev team to implode (everybody but one person on the 8-man team left within a year). The systems' stability and overall architecture was utterly terrible, servers would fall over because they would log so many things that they'd run out of disk space ("what's logrotate?" "What's a slave database?"), no metrics, no definition of success for a service, etc.

I suppose you could pull this "DevOps" thing off if you really wanted to, but you have to hire folks who can program and actually like sysadmin work. Otherwise you end up hiring developers to do everything, who are terrible at sysadmin work, and who get burnt out because they never get to actually program.