[davesmylie]

I progressed from coding to sysops - probably differs from company to company, but as a software dev I was pretty much locked into doing the same thing day-in and day-out (ie coding, and probably only in a small number of different languages).

I find a lot more variety / interest in operations - there's a lot of scope to play with infrastructure, security, performance tracking, sysadmin stuff etc, and even to get a small amount of coding done on company time - though not on product, more on ancillary support services/infrastructure.

It's still IT, so a lot of industry knowledge and skill transfer is still relevant.