Another things, bucy has ranted about for a while. I've just been completely uninclined to sysadmin. But the key to success as a more matured programmer is being willing to scale up the project as necessary. My dad, not a sysadmin, has a notion of 1-x projects. Generally, these are "simple" which can be done in "an afternoon" with standard tools. Every escalation (having to bring in additional help, buying a new power tool, making something non-functional for longer than projected, etc) adds an x.
So to with muxing with systems. I generally approach a problem, where something did/does work sometimes, as a configuration issue. That its just a problem of permissions. To be effective now, I just have to remember that its not a big energy-gap jump to where the fix involves writing code. Back in high school, perhaps, I had a great deal more dedication toward making it work through available tools. No longer -- that's what phat perl and python skillz are for. And fluency in reading n-languages... it must be remembered that 'source-code availability' is not just a speech issue, its a way to make things work.
Additional note: livejournal has phat in its spelling dictionary, but it still lacks skillz
