It's a matter of temperament rather than technical skill. Some people like to really get their teeth stuck into a problem and work on it for years at a time. Some people like to execute one discrete task and move onto the next. Both could be equally good at writing code and configuring operating systems. But one will be happier as a programmer and one will be happier as a sysadmin. They might even produce the same number of lines of code a year, one a single 10,000 line program and the other a hundred hundred-line scripts.
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It's a matter of temperament rather than technical skill. Some people like to really get their teeth stuck into a problem and work on it for years at a time. Some people like to execute one discrete task and move onto the next. Both could be equally good at writing code and configuring operating systems. But one will be happier as a programmer and one will be happier as a sysadmin. They might even produce the same number of lines of code a year, one a single 10,000 line program and the other a hundred hundred-line scripts.