Not sure exactly. Tinkering, curiosity, free reign to learn new things at a few lucky jobs, guilt at throwing problems "over the wall" to ops people, and the fa

Not sure exactly. Tinkering, curiosity, free reign to learn new things at a few lucky jobs, guilt at throwing problems "over the wall" to ops people, and the fact that we're all operators sometimes (we all probably run personal servers and local networks) -- these were all a factor for me. I mostly build, but running things is also fun, and building things with a knowledge of what's downstream is the most fun, imo.