This is something that annoys me. I’m most comfortable identifying as a sysadmin for a few reasons. I spend a lot of my time on problems that don’t make sense to automate. I spend my time at the code level building automation tooling instead of creating or debugging application code. Historically I have often spent my time with developers guiding them on how what they’re doing fits into a broader ecosystem, teaching them something both critical and esoteric about the application so that they can do their job better, and often guiding them on specs.

It’s not everyone’s experience, but my experience has been that a lot of developers who don’t have a sysadmin background aren’t as skilled at those things. The business analysis, cost control, or the application meets infrastructure parts. Case in point, one of my best friends and frequent professional collaborators is a pure-programming guy who works in AWS. He knows everything there is to know about provisioning the most common AWS resources via CloudFormation and Terraform, but I have never seen him demonstrate a realistic understanding of costs or _why_ certain resources are used in lieu of others, or a strong aptitude in optimizing for specific workloads and business cases. If he hits on an area that is “traditionally” sysadmin work, it’s deer in the headlights.