One one hand there were definitely support-staff system administrators, but on the other hand there were people writing USENIX papers. Large system administrati

One one hand there were definitely support-staff system administrators, but on the other hand there were people writing USENIX papers. Large system administration was system engineering. The people who wrote Nagios, RRDtool, bcfg3 and cfengine, and so on, were solving their own problems first. I think people like Evi Nemeth, Tom Limoncelli, Æleen Frisch or David Blank-Edelman would have been the equivalent of Distinguished Sysadmins at the time. But they weren't at startups. The places that needed that level were universities, research facilities, telecommunications companies, and the like. I was fortunate to work under Geoff Halprin early in my career, who while not as well known as those names was a SAGE and USENIX board member and who definitely planted the "don't just do task, engineer yourself out of a job" seed in me.