I don't really buy that. I know several great programmers who are now great sysadmins, or vice versa. Now, sysadmin may be a bit of a misnomer - sometimes sysa

I don't really buy that. I know several great programmers who are now great sysadmins, or vice versa. Now, sysadmin may be a bit of a misnomer - sometimes sysadmins are given fancy titles such as 'network engineer', 'network architect', 'IT Manager', etc. They're all basically sysadmins. Good sysadmins do more than just image laptops. They are familiar with the software's architecture, so they can help scale it up to whatever proportions are needed. They almost certaintly are proficient perl/bash/python programmers as well.