Definitely. I’ve written about this many times before. Sysadmins (and nearby fields) are expected to know not only how to use their own tools, but every application ever written in any OS ever and, relatedly, how to do everyone’s job in the entire company better than they themselves can do it.
It’s in-fucking-sane. But it is very common. Enough that it is nearly ubiquitous.
The reason this occurs is that IT has more generally-competent people than other career paths. In an average company, about 1-2% of people outside of IT can handle complex tasks, deal with abstractions, and follow directions reliably. In IT departments — and especially among sysadmins — these high-level capabilities are found in up to 40% of the population. That’s not being arrogant. That’s just reality — a sysadmin’s whole job is dealing with complex and ever-changing abstractions across many disparate areas, and in a way that no other role really does to any great degree. Thus, IT in general and sysadmins in specific become a dumping ground for tasks too complex for other departments to handle, no matter what they might be.
About the breadth of what’s expected in my field, I’ve designed a new network architecture from scratch, determined why DNS wasn’t working, done troubleshooting on a malfunctioning switch, punched down physical phone lines, created a website and fixed a receipt printer — and that was all on the same fucking day. There is nearly no other job where that breadth and depth of knowledge is required all at once.
Because we do in fact know a lot, people assume we should know absolutely everything and be able to train them in fields and software that they should already be experts in. And then they cry like little babies when we cannot or will not do this.
But at least the pay is good.