ZucchinA (plural: zucchinE) is the ITALIAN word for courgette. And its gender is female (like any other PLANT name in latin and therefore also modern italian). ZucchinI is the americanized version of it - all of a sudden turned into a MALE noun. Go figure.

I kind of like the "call for collaboration" at the end of the post. Albeit I think that it is also an attitude of the people: you don't necessarily HAVE TO give them more to do or they would be bored. If they get bored, they are doing something wrong. If they have more time on their hands, they should probably use it to study, and grow.... maybe learn a bit more about what the other guys are doing. Maybe that ITPro who is scared or scripting should try to do it and see that it won't kill him if he does... it might actually open his mind. I generally agree with many of the comments up here: Brandon Black, as well as bdunbar to quote a couple. You can't be a good programmer if you dont' know how systems work, and you can't be a good sysadmin if you can't code a little (or a little more). The slides mentioned by ejunker are also an awesome example. Albeit you only have limited time in your days, you should be striving to increase your knowledge and know more of both worlds. Because, in fact, I think that the whole division between those two worlds has been historically a marketing artefact - a strategy to create audiences to "target" and to seel products and services too. In the unix world, you have "programs" that do complex and useful things, which really are big PERL scripts - written by sysadmins, to solve system administrations's headaches. In the Windows world the division is a lot more visible or frequent... but lately a lot more people understood that those two audiences must be talking to each other and uderstanding each other more. Think of powershell, for example - I see it as a step in that direction. bdunbar is also making a good point, about the evolution to the cloud, and the higher level of skills required. the whole "division" between the two becomes a lot more blurry over time. Which is a good thing. Let's hope it eventually fades away.