Comment Re:It's a Great Learning Experience (Score 2) 226
The difference is between developers knowing the operations side and being the operations side. Developers need to know the operations side to know how to write software that Ops can install and manage. And they should be involved in the development environment and installation in the testing environment so any gotchas can be addressed quickly and the developers know exactly what happened and can go back and make sure it doesn't happen again (especially in production). And of course when things really go pear-shaped during production deployments it never hurts to have the developers on tap to tell Ops whether there's a simple, quick workaround that'll salvage the deployment or whether it's time to roll back until they can fix the problem. But those are a far cry from developers doing Operations support and administration work on a daily basis. Frankly they're two radically different skill-sets. They're related, sure, but having a developer doing Ops as a regular job is like having Kelly Johnson keeping a fleet of Piper Cubs in shape. Sure he can do it, and technically he can probably do it better than a regular mechanic, but in a month or so he'd be bored to tears and walking out to go work somewhere where they'd actually let him do his job designing and building planes like the SR-71.