...I learned from Larry Wall.
When I mentioned my observation of the general decline in quality of sysadmins to Mr. Wall, he told that once upon a time there was no such job. Those developers who knew the system best became responsible for setting it up and maintaining it, in addition to their other development responsibilities. This implies that all developers had to know something about OS-level chores (which I think is also becoming a rarity). The balkanization of computer skill sets is harming the timely delivery of quality software. No wonder programming is considered by some to be an "low-skill" job that can be easily exported.
Several years ago when I worked for an Insurance Company as tech support, I installed additional RAM into a "developer's" PC. She pointed to the CPU and said "oh, is that what the CPU looks like?" When I told her that the problem she was complaining about sounded like the infamous condition known as "DLL Hell," she confessed to not knowing what DLL files were (even though she was developing Windows applications).
It's clear to me that sysadmins will be outsourced faster and in greater numbers that developers.
