That just shows their Mort-ness in their own domain though. In the Unix world, a sysadmin may not be a software engineer, but the ability to cruft up a program in bash, perl, or python to automate some task would be table stakes for the job. On Windows, not so much.

These admins learned just enough to be competent at the job that was in front of them. Many (not all) VB and VBA programmers are the same way.