DevOps is a young field at the intersection of development and system administration. It appeared only in the 2000s, but even now no major project is unthinkable without it.
DevOps is not just a set of tools, methods and practices, but a whole movement that helps developers, operations engineers, monitoring and support services to find a common language and launch quality projects from the beginning to the end.
Choosing between the two areas, a specialist with quite a lot of experience often can not decide where to direct his efforts. You should never think that admins cannot work as programmers. Yes, it is quite difficult to go from system administrator to programmer, but at the same time there is nothing impossible. The main professional qualities that a system administrator has are a fairly high analytical ability, flexibility, high concentration, resistance to stress, as well as the desire and ability to perform routine work. The administrator must also understand that he will have to work not only with the equipment and technology, but also with people, so the nature of the specialist must be communicative and tactful.
System administrator or programmer – tests and surveys show that most people simply do not distinguish between these concepts, and think that these people do the same thing. But in fact, programmers and admins are completely different professionals. You can not just answer the question: the system administrator or programmer – which is better? There are advantages for everyone in this or that profession, but to understand them, you need to clearly separate the concepts and understand who of them and what they do.