On top of that, there needs to be some Dev to go with the Ops. I've seen some guys who come from a great SysAdmin background that are used to some Powershell or Bash but get utterly lost with Chef or Puppet. Not just that but the overall package of scripts is just messy and very hard to maintain.
That being said- I'd rather have someone transitioning to DevOps with more SysAdmin experience than Dev- the cleanliness and composition can be learned a lot faster than the networking, security, and other topics that most Devs have never had to maintain first hand.
"I'd rather have someone transitioning to DevOps with more SysAdmin experience than Dev- the cleanliness and composition can be learned a lot faster than the networking, security, and other topics that most Devs have never had to maintain first hand."
Totay agree. It's a lot easier to pick up enough Ruby to be comfortable with Chef than it is to learn the thousands of different things about networking and security - and probably the OS your average developer has been using for a long time too - that a good sysadmin knows.
That being said- I'd rather have someone transitioning to DevOps with more SysAdmin experience than Dev- the cleanliness and composition can be learned a lot faster than the networking, security, and other topics that most Devs have never had to maintain first hand.