I think the distinction is in systems programming versus system programming. Systems programming involves multiple systems with many components. It's not uncom

I think the distinction is in systems programming versus system programming. Systems programming involves multiple systems with many components. It's not uncommon to find you simply can't make a solution work any better than it's designed, and you need to develop brand new solutions to problems (which makes the system even bigger). System programming is simpler because it's one system and one or two codebases. It can still be quite complex, but you can often just optimize the one solution rather than having to come up with new ones.