Excerpt from the book Unix and Linux System Administration Handbook by Evi Nemeth , Garth Snyder , Trent R. Hein , and Ben Whaley

The Wikipedia page for “system administrator” includes a nice discussion of the tasks that system administration is generally thought to include. This page currently draws a rather sharp distinction between administration and software development, but in our experience, professional administrators spend much of their time writing scripts. That doesn’t make system administrators developers per se, but it does mean that they need many of the same analytical and architectural skills.