The unspoken elephant in this thread is that sysadmins and developers have broken relationships surrounded by organizational dysfunction. Personally, I feel th

The unspoken elephant in this thread is that sysadmins and developers have broken relationships surrounded by organizational dysfunction. Personally, I feel that system administration experience of some sort is essential to development skills, and development experience of some sort is essential to system administration. Communication and leadership skills are essential to both. It _used_ to be OK if you were the jerk at the office if you were good enough at your job (sysadmin or developer). That's no longer the case because we've progressed well past the point where a single developer or sysadmin can be enough of an asset to look past their ability to work well with others. Operations needs stability. Developers need to hit moving targets. Sysadmins need to keep things manageable, compatible, and secure. These aren't incompatible goals, and usually when you get the techies talking they are sympathetic towards each other's challenges and helpful to one another. With as many project managers, engineering managers, manager managers, directors, and executives in the mix I wonder if the problems in all these environments isn't more of a historic issue with leadership failings.