I see it as "systems programming" is building the "systems" that one later assembles into applications. "Applications programming" is building user facing appl

I see it as "systems programming" is building the "systems" that one later assembles into applications. "Applications programming" is building user facing applications, mostly out of systems others have built. e.g. I work for a company that makes a database. Even though I work in a higher level language (Julia), it's still systems development because it's concerned with systems-level concerns: building a system that is normally off the shelf, and being concerned with memory bandwidth, fragmentation, cache misses, etc. And it's not that application level engineers don't have to be worried about these things. It's just a matter of degrees or emphasis. When employed doing "application programming", I consider it bad practice to build systems from scratch. e.g. rolling your own queueing system or database when the real job is integration and solving the customer's business requirements.