I was system admin for years. Luckily, I design systems now, so I don't have to administer them. I now have a team for that.

The sucky pary... this was a "lateral" move, so I still make the same. But, I got that window. Oh, that window!
I work for a small Software and website development company and my job duties consist of maintaining both our office network and our production server network. We host almost 500 sites and have technology ranging from Windows Server 2003/2008, VMWare, SQL, MySQL, CentOS, PHP, ColdFusion and .NET.
I have the pleasure of designing all the hardware configurations that we use, as well as maintaining them. I also do all the launches on the sites that we develop. So, I have a base in programming, mostly in ColdFusion and PHP, and I am trying to learn some .NET now. That's the nice part about working around developers, I am constantly learning (although, that's pretty much what a sys admin has to do to keep up with the times) new things.
When we finally expand to our very own building, we currently take up a floor in a 4 story building, I have been promised to have my own office that is next to the server room that will be housed in class for a nice presentation to clients that walk through our office. I should then have my very own window as well
Maybe one day, I will get lucky enough to get my own team to manage all the peon stuff that I have to deal with day to day. If I could get this VoIP phone system off my hands, I would be very happy, not mentioning the desktop support...oh, how I hate desktop support!!