A good sysadmin may not be able to do graphics programming, but they have plenty of practice in the sort of programming used in package management, as well as a

A good sysadmin may not be able to do graphics programming, but they have plenty of practice in the sort of programming used in package management, as well as a fairly good understanding of operating systems. They’re not going to grasp everything as well as somebody with a development background, like learning NEW programming languages on the fly and upstreaming changes, but I don’t think it’s totally outside of what they can learn and hiring a developer would present just as many challenges. I might look more for somebody who bills themselves as “devops” or “sre” than sysadmin though since those job descriptions tend to effectively filter out those who can’t program at all. If anything I see those people as being software developers that specialize in systems administration.