I had a few jobs once out of college (phone support, QA (before automation was much of a thing), sysadmin, back to phone support) before I got a programming job. That was a good two years out of learning the other parts of a computer. It was because I knew perl that I was able to do the sysadmin - web programmer transition.

That wasn't too unusual of a path back in the mid-late 90s.

A good chunk the developers over in the engineering department and nearly everyone in the programing wings of IT and customer support had done tech support or system administration. It was just part of the "working your way up" within the career path.

Many of my classmates in college went to a "the computer guy" job which did all of the computer stuff for a small company (hardware, software, helping with excel, writing programs to serve dynamic text to the web server). Being a computer person back then was a much more generalized skill set.

As an aside, recently I was tapped on my team (Java developers) to do work on an older website. LAMP. I had to brush up on Linux from the past decade (I was another decade out of date with some of the package management)... but being able to do that sysadmin, read perl (I know of one other perl coder in the department, but he doesn't have any sysadmin background) and get it running was a skillset that didn't exist much of anywhere else.