Does system administration dumb down the brain?
cmkrnl: I'm an admin, and certainly can relate to what Abby says. However, I can also code in half a dozen languages, and often fix things with a few lines of expect and shell, where our enterprise java cowboys would demand a new server with a java app server and still can't do a complete job of it.
Being a sysadmin was fun in the early 20's. Now getting close to 30, I get high on Scala, the finer points of TCL etc. I do worry about the future though.