I was raised in the South and grew up across the midwest, so that may color my perspective. The place where I encountered sysadmins the most was people who man

I was raised in the South and grew up across the midwest, so that may color my perspective. The place where I encountered sysadmins the most was people who managed a small collection of assets; the keyword being managed. I didn't see them inventing entirely new systems. Working across DCs, I would see Systems Engineers building these new systems, being escalation support for them, and at times coding up entirely new infrastructure applications. I don't really buy the idea that administrators are underappreciated, I just don't think it accurately captures what a systems person on a product team actually does, much less the distinction between a SRE-SE and a systems person. My base argument is that it's not the same job at all. A good Systems Engineer does not guarantee a good SRE-SE because the job is that much different. One of the notable distinctions is writing application code, which is much different from Terraform, Ansible, Salt etc