Senior sysadmins in the late 2000's knew how to code for sure, usually perl and some C (though not to the level you'd want them writing code full time).

More fancy sysadmins who were "modern" would learn Ruby.

The issue with "sysadmin" was that it suffered an inflation treadmill, what used to be a very difficult job where you would need to understand programming, debugging, compilers, OS design, distributed systems and so forth became a title for senior helpdesk staff; who, naturally, did not know those things.