Comment Re: Administrators (Score 1) 538
To some degree it depends upon the specialty of the programmer. Programmers who mostly write business apps in Java or C# may not get much exposure to a lot of this, but systems programmers will due to the type of code they write.
In a previous job as a consultant I picked up a fair amount of work from various IT departments in diagnosing what went wrong when things did not work as expected.
It can be useful to have someone you can call to dump a network capture and determine who messed up the implementation of a protocol (and help write up a bug report for the vendor, fix it if the source is available, or insert a bridge with a program which will fix the issue as it passes traffic if necessary.) This is especially true when less common operating systems are involved, as sysadmins tend to specialize a bit more in this way (OS400 and S/390 were good sources of income on a few occasions.)
I may not be as fast at configuring whatever they are using since I do not know how the menus or config files are put together until I look, but having implemented most of the major protocols over the years I know what the options mean (or failing that, I can read the spec.)