I don't think it's BS if we're talking about professions rather than hobbies. Just because you do both doesn't mean that either one is a specialty.

All coders do some system administration as a matter of course, and the reverse is true as well. But to specialize in both is probably rare.

Well, I am a professional in both, and it's not at all BS. Yes, it's possible to dabble in both, but if we're talking expert levels here, then guys that are experts in both the programming and sysadmin fields are really, really rare. (I'm not an expert in either field. I'm just barely good enough to do it professionally.)

Respectfully, I think that once you start dealing with some more interesting problems, and doing so professionally, you might begin to realize just how much you don't know in one field or another.

Agreed. Of course to a degree it matters what you mean by "excel".

In general, an expert program will not be a truly expert sysops because each of them is a deep field and developing truly deep expertise in either of them can be an almost all consuming task.

But, you can easily find people that are pretty good at both, and I would go so far as to say anyone who is good at one also already knows at least the basics of the other, they just might not be a true expert. Certainly anyone who is good at one has shown they have the right mindset and capabilities to become good at the other if they decided to.

Good point about them drawing on the same qualities. Makes sense.

You can enjoy both, but sometimes, and mainly due to lack of extra hours on the clock. The focus needs to be maintained on often divergent set of problems.

Not all programmers are very familiar with hardware issues, or dependent on their area of programming expertise on network design.

I also found that many programmers are oriented towards creating new features, while administrators focus on running established tools at maximum efficiency.

While drawing on the same set of qualities, the interpretation of them can diverge.

Some people posses both sensibilities and the mind space to treat both disciplines well in environments and projects that scale. They are not common.

maximum efficiency, bah! a good sysadmin is focused on keeping shit from breaking. If that means putting up an active-active redundant system where you really only need the capacity of one system, so be it.

Those of us who get paged when the shit hits the fan tend to be pretty careful of breaking things; and quite often, we work on systems where relatively short downtimes can lead to losses greater than our yearly salaries.

That said, all the best SysAdmins have at least some background in C and NIX systems programming, and nearly all NIX systems programmers are also pretty good SysAdmins.

And these qualities make sense in consulting and many other domains, too. So would you let a consultant run your servers then? (I know this is a bit over the edge, but...)