Yes, we are rare indeed. There's not much of a market for writing tools that work with the OS, developers usually want to stay away from the OS-provided mechanisms, like build and packaging systems, network configuration, event logging, HA tools, configuration management, and others.

In my career I've seen maybe four people who can be called system programmers. It's a pity, because there's still so much to build, and it takes a system programmer to spot what ops tools to build, why, and to actually build them.

>developers usually want to stay away from the OS-provided mechanisms, like build and packaging systems, network configuration, event logging, HA tools, configuration management, and others.

That's somewhat ironic, since doing development and building software tools in such areas (and system software in general) can be very interesting work: including not just the programming, but also the conceptualization, the product requirement definition, the design, seeing it in deployment and iterating to make changes, add new wanted features, etc.

That has not been my main area of work, but I have some background in it, and have done some pieces here and there (small products or parts of others) and find it to be really enjoyable work. In fact, for many developers, it can be more fun than doing business domain-level development (LOB apps), or social media / consumer apps kind of stuff. I've done some work in all those 3 broad areas, hence the comment.