[rcymerys]

I couldn't agree more.

I didn't realize the importance of all the "admin stuff", before the our newly hired sysadmin came to me and asked if I could help him figure out how to deploy the project I was working on. This ended up being a looong chat about monitoring, redundancy, architecture, security... you name it. What I've always thought of as installing and configuring software turned out to also touch designing the software so that it works reliably and is easy to maintain.

I don't think I'll ever have plenty of sysadmin skills, but knowing even the general idea of what's important to sysadmins helps a lot. Also, being able to become another interruption in their day and consult ideas is priceless. :)