At a certain point operations becomes development and vice versa. When you really need to be good at managing computers and servers, you have to understand how

At a certain point operations becomes development and vice versa. When you really need to be good at managing computers and servers, you have to understand how those things work. At a certain point you're literally writing shell or even Python scripts. When you need to be really good at programming computers and servers, you need to understand the underlying OS and hardware, for maximum performance and to solve particularly-annoying bugs. At a certain point in optimizing your development and configuring your code package / repository / etc. you're basically doing ops stuff. Of course there are people who focus on developing and not really managing their systems, and people who go deep into managing the systems and not really learning to code. But I would imagine any half-decent ops person has at least basic knowledge in software development. And while there are people who can truly be both full-time developers and full-time operations, they probably don't do both in their job.