Not necessarily. While agree that "bad habits" can be broken, moving from the land of "rigorous empirical evidence" to the abstract world of slinging bits is an

Not necessarily. While agree that "bad habits" can be broken, moving from the land of "rigorous empirical evidence" to the abstract world of slinging bits is another animal. I went from sysadmin to coder, and I had to break and unlearn many of my former ways. Much of what I do is fairly straightforward stuff, as I write tools that other people use, but I will say that being a sysadmin (still do a lot of it) and now supporting them has been very beneficial to my ability to think like the very people who use code I write. I know very few PhDs who are also sysadmins. And fewer yet who can properly diagnose issues with workstations, servers, etc. In college campuses, the labs are maintained by sysadmins. I've worked with PhDs who were "coders", yet could not set up their own programming environments because they were done for them in academia. Not all, but most. I'm not deriding PhDs here, but as one poster said, they generally work in silo environments and don't really understand the broader pictures around them.