I vote for #5, No difference, which is not the same as #4 Can't tell, I think? Basically because most of us are being to ask fill ALL the roles listed below. There is no difference. The lack of education on managements part about the differences is one of the many reasons I started a SharePoint Users Group. One of our goals, lofty as it is, is to help educate managers, employees, users, etc on what the clearly defined roles should be!

In my experience most people that think they fall into #1 are also being tasked with #2 tasks as well and visa versa. Are corporations just getting cheap and trying to squeeze as much value out of each employee or is it truly lack of education? That's the $64k question!!!

I agree with you on the fact that those that are tasked with development tasks don't quite know  the innards of SharePoint administration (permissions, sometimes the object model, etc.) and then the administrators though they might not know the .NET framework or all aspects of the object models, but they know the security model (at least most do) and they know the finer points of how active directory works with SharePoint (again, most do, some rookies may not).

All in all I would say that from my experience I think that administrators end up with more stress than developers as the developers have a single task at hand that they have to worry about, sure it might have to integrate with a few different systems, but they can see the end of the tunnel and have a plan of attack where as the administrators have to hope that the developers don't deploy something that kills the system, they typically have user expectations to deal with first hand and they have other administration tasks that they end up having to do during off hours.

That's my two cents though... wish I had a spare $64k around.

Well, I certainly understand everyone has different experiences and opinons, but from an amusing aspect. my experience is just the opposite of yours. Developers(like myself) are being asked to do a lot of Admin tasks and therefore bear the brunt of the stress. Guess I need to find a job in your kind of environment, but then where would the fun be?

By the way, for those youngsters here, the reference to the $64k question was related to a tv show in the 50's called the $64,000 Question, whole another story there of course<grin>

Wasn't it the $10,000 pyramid??????????

The universe of an Administrator/Architect is finite. You only get
what's in the box. It's a big box but it is finite.

The universe of a developer  is infinite, as limitless as your
imagination. I like to think that is bigger than the box. Granted, some
people have limited imaginations or can't see the forest for all the
trees, but I think that you get the idea.

Different people are challenged in different ways. While I yawn at the
thought of determining the schedule of a search crawl, some people
really enjoy concurring every configurable aspect of a product. I'd
prefer figuring out how to make a div popup at specific XY coordinates
based upon the current location of the mouse.

Until the ratings got better….................

I don't see how you could say one was harder over the other. Comes down
to skills, experience and personal strengths. I think CSS is easy and
marvel at C# skills, but know  developers who think the opposite.

SharePoint is usually a challenge in general because often you are asked
to wear different hats, thus flexing your ability to learn and deal with
new things.

So I guess I say #3.

I think any language that begins with the letter C is beautiful