That's more or less the point. System administration vs. software development is as much about priorities, mindset, and day to day environment than technical competence. This is true at all levels, whether you are pushing boundaries Google or supporting internal corporate users.
I never had a google internship or anything similar, and my first technical job out of college involved supporting an internally developed, browser-based ActiveX/.asp/vbscript tool for viewing and annotating loan documents. For a long time we on the systems team were unable to upgrade IE on user workstations because of a critical, easily reproducible bug in the document viewer tool. Eventually, I managed to get access to a snapshot of their codebase and tracked down the bug in a few hours (despite never having written a line of .asp or vbscript in my life and not having access to any of the documentation for the 3rd party libraries and activex components). The devs, of course, didn't listen to me anyway, despite my basically handing a solution to them. The bug remained for another year until that section of code was incidentally re-written to support some other feature.
The next company I worked for, a web company, had a much better relationship between development and operations. It might have helped that we had a lot of Indian developers, who didn't seem to have the same prejudices that western devs do: that system administrators are people who just aren't skilled enough to do development.
I never had a google internship or anything similar, and my first technical job out of college involved supporting an internally developed, browser-based ActiveX/.asp/vbscript tool for viewing and annotating loan documents. For a long time we on the systems team were unable to upgrade IE on user workstations because of a critical, easily reproducible bug in the document viewer tool. Eventually, I managed to get access to a snapshot of their codebase and tracked down the bug in a few hours (despite never having written a line of .asp or vbscript in my life and not having access to any of the documentation for the 3rd party libraries and activex components). The devs, of course, didn't listen to me anyway, despite my basically handing a solution to them. The bug remained for another year until that section of code was incidentally re-written to support some other feature.
The next company I worked for, a web company, had a much better relationship between development and operations. It might have helped that we had a lot of Indian developers, who didn't seem to have the same prejudices that western devs do: that system administrators are people who just aren't skilled enough to do development.