Its still valuable for a sysadmins to have some ability to program/script, if only to improve his own utility and sanity (automating out trivial/mindless things); however, its not clear to me why sysadmins seem to often have trouble breaking into programming — afaict, they’re extremely similar in practice. Particularly when you accept that most of software engineering is just composing libraries, while system administrators compose programs and os’s. Both rely on incantations held together by poor documentation, arbitrary configuration, and convoluted tooling. Programming is a bit more structured in its language.. but otherwise they’re rather similar requirements (and half of why you have SEs trying to eat SAs lunch); it’s not obvious to me that the inverse task should be a significant hurdle.

Or rather, the experience of an SA should translate decently into SE