I imagine a systems programmer would not consider user-facing applications as their program especially if they had no hand in writing these user-facing applications. In my imagination, a systems programmer abstracts out application programming and just blocks it out.

Personally, I think in abstractions as well. I don't spend a lot of time thinking about fetch, execute, decode, ... when I write my line of business applications. I probably should but as I pound out lines after lines of garbage, I could be a lot more conscientious but I tell myself my code runs on top of other people's code (and really I am not that great of a programmer anyway so I should focus on my part of the code rather than the platform which I can't change anyways).

https://www.cs.umd.edu/class/sum2003/cmsc311/Notes/CompOrg/f...