The problem is, however, that those two roles require different knowledge, skills, attitudes and mindsets, and so many (most?) developers don't really like sysadminning: you know, messing with VLANs, DNS resolving, packet routing, gluing two networks (one in Sidney, second one in New York) into one via VPN, watching disk quotas and memory limits, working around bugs in Linux scheduler, pinning CPUs, all that mind-bogglingly boring (but needed for smooth operation) stuff.
I enjoy making sure software works for people, the more people the better. If that involves all that sysadminning, I will enjoy that as well.
But most of my peers are oblivious to the fact whether their code will be used at all and are having fun filling their heads with complex abstractions right before spitting them on screen.
