Some companies don't have a DBA on purpose. It's called Agile Development. Some experienced developers who are trying to follow agile development want to retain all control over the databases. Generally the network admins are clueless about this as is IT management. Agile developers have quite often dealt with "old style" DBAs in the past and don't want anyone or anything to block rapid change/development.

In our case the developers are doing a fairly good job of developing a new product using .net with sql 2005 backend and even tune indexes etc. The main problem is the neglect of basic things such as disk space and disaster recovery.

Typically developers assume the hardware will handle whatever is thrown at it.