[dennyferra]

I wonder how a progsysadmin would compare to the desingineer. I'd imagine it's easier to find a progsysadmin just from my own experience. I've had a few jobs where I was responsible for both the programming and system administration, in small companies of course.

[rhizome]

That's more complicated due to the history of programming and sysadmin being more closely intertwined, as you discovered. The first 20 years of Unix were the "systems programmer" domain, having followed the "sales engineer" era of the 60s (speaking roughly here) after the burgeoning computer industry's customer relations functions started getting specialized and split off from nerds. There were many, many more of you 30 years ago.