Programmers have to program under stress on occasion for fixing or shipping stuff rather quickly before, say, a meeting with VCs. But this is where the sysadmin / execution-focused folks will perform better on what would seem to be menial tasks because most programmers are so used to controlling their work environment while sysadmins and network admins are oftentimes running under tight "get it done right now" situations.

I've hired a couple guys for my ops team that are primarily developers because I want a more forward-thinking and feature development pace for the work we do, and just plain better forethought would cut these stressful scenarios down to maybe half an hour of troubleshooting instead of hours and days.