I still believe, a good or the best sysadmins are the ones who can code. A sysadmin should know the system inside out, including the software running over it.
As a sysadmin for the last 15 years, I'm fine with this, as long as you're going to pay me as a senior software engineer (if I have to know the app inside and out) who is also going to be on call constantly and doing infrastructure all day long.
If you as a business or employer want to continue to squeeze additional roles and knowledge into people, be prepared to pay for it.
Why would you want to get paid less? In my experience developers in Indy get about 80k. SysAdmins for IS and SQLServer get about 120k. They also don't have to work that long since the servers themselves are fairly robust.
> SysAdmins for IIS and SQLServer get about 120k. [My note: I presume you do mean IIS]
Presuming this is USD, but even in the UK as GBP - "In my dreams" - and I'm a developer as well as a sysadmin for Windows (IIS/SQL) and Linux (Apache/MySQL), 25 years man and boy but have always kept on top of my game :)
Outside of London you'd be lucky to hit 45K GBP (~70K US$) in a permy role with that skillset, perhaps 60-65K GBP if contracting.
Midwest pays about 80 to 95K for a decent sysadmin (Unix/Linux w/ 10+ years of experience), only the specialized shops (trading firms, any place with a lot of money flowing through them) will go 120K or more.
If you know of any place north of Chicago that pays 120K or more for a 20-year Unix/Linux engineer with C systems level programming talent, and won't burn you out in 2 years like the trading firms downtown, I'd be interested.
If you as a business or employer want to continue to squeeze additional roles and knowledge into people, be prepared to pay for it.