System administrator job duties

While looking online at different job sites I noticed approx 70% of sysadmin jobs require a lot of programming knowledge and experience.

I've never heard of sysadmins being programmers.

Is this just because company's want to save money and hire a programmer/sysadmin?

Or is this pretty standard?

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Comments

vCole

Really depends on the size of the shop. I think it's great to have knowledge in both areas.

nhpr

Sys admins need to be able to automate tasks with scripting, which requires some programming skills. For maintenance tasks, if an admin can't punch out a script to take care of it, that means he's doing it manually. If he's doing it manually, then he's wasting time on something that he doesn't need to be; plus, a script will do the task on time the correct way every time. So yes, basic coding skills are pretty standard.

WillTech105

From my exp: Sys Admin title is basically "Jack of all" title.

Except they cant say Jack of all trades, they call it Sys Admin.

Mc5ully

I agree with you on having knowledge in both areas.

But I think it's asking your sysadmins to be almost too much. Unless the pay reflects it I guess.

Or if the business is small and needs a few multitaskers instead of departments.

I can see sysadmins doing help desk, networking, database work, etc. But programming shouldn't be part of the normal job duties.

Maybe I'm alone in this.

Mc5ully

Thanks for all the comments so far.

I should have been more specific with the programming language.

I'm not talking about VB. I'm talking more about Perl, Ruby, Java, etc.

vCole

Mc5ully wrote: »

Thanks for all the comments so far.

I should have been more specific with the programming language.

I'm not talking about VB. I'm talking more about Perl, Ruby, Java, etc.

Well a lot of common tech has Perl APIs (MS, Linux, VMware, etc. to name a few) Perl & PHP can be considered scripting languages. Some people enjoy doing a little bit of both (personally, I do) so those type of positions are great for us!

qwertyiop

I know about those but you will find that many sysadmin jobs especially those requiring *nix skills usually require a mixture of perl, python and shell. On the windows side of things its usually Batch, powershell and VB.

Mc5ully

Thanks for the feedback from everyone.

Sees this is very common and I need to start learning some windows programming.