I initially chose System Administration simply because it was attractive to me to be the HMFIC, and generally above the law as corporate policy is concerned, as said law for the most part applied to people with less comprehensive knowledge about how any given system or technology works.

Since then though, I've learned that there's basically no better way to become a jack of all trades than being a sysadmin. There's no other position in the tech field that more easily and gracefully parlays into other specialties.

I write automation and aggregation software now, but I still consider myself a sysadmin by trade, as automation is just another function of system administration. I write everything in vim, and almost entirely in perl, because I am concerned above most other concerns about performance. I could learn C or Go or Rust or some other low-level compiled language, and I'm sure I could create even more performant software that way, but that would take me farther away from my passion: System Administration.