I think you're right in that some people can do both. But how good the product is, well, depends a lot on the problem at hand. I spent 8 years at uni doing bo

I think you're right in that some people can do both. But how good the product is, well, depends a lot on the problem at hand. I spent 8 years at uni doing both visual arts and IT, majoring in programming. I've spent most of my professional career doing a combination of design and programming and I actually believe that the knowledge you gain from one thing influences the other. But both fields are massive, and I believe I could spend my entire career being good at either. Or I could spend my career being mediocre are both. For what it's worth I do a lot of ops work at the moment too, and it's the same kind of thing, but ops + programming is even closer than design + programming. Every good ops guy i've ever met is good at programming, and every good programmer i've ever met is good at ops.