I worked for an ISP in the late 90s/early 2000s for about a year before my final year at Uni that when I started had 2,000 customers and by the time I left we'd

I worked for an ISP in the late 90s/early 2000s for about a year before my final year at Uni that when I started had 2,000 customers and by the time I left we'd got to 750k customers. It was the best training I could have for writing software for the Internet. Just a couple of months ago we noticed one of our core apps was not scaling no matter how many docker containers we had spun up in Mesos. Spent a week breaking it apart using that experience and being able to make changes directly to the code base and being able to talk to devops in a language they understood, and in under 5 days we managed to identify and fix 7-8 different issues. I would value a dev with sysadmin experience _far_ higher than one without in a tech business with a headcount under 500: it's going to lead to fewer problems and issues in the short and medium term.