The advantage of this is that gets you out of some of the myopia that the tech sector has a tendency to instill, as well as broadening your geographical opportunities beyond the few tech hot spots. It also teaches you the three most important words a sysadmin has to learn to say: "I don't know". A sysadmin who can't say that immediately when it's true is going to have problems (after all ops is about 85% reading documentation), and figuring out how to get data from a barn to a datacenter will teach you to say it quickly.
Another piece of advice: if you haven't already, work in a datacenter, at least once, for at least a year, before you quit in disgust (everybody does). No datacenter sysadmin is happy, but it's a huge resume buff and it teaches you a lot.
Now, I'm not a coder, except to the extent that every sysadmin is, and my field's definition of "output" is different (and for that matter ops in general is grayer than dev). But just personally I feel a confidence in my skills and experience that I didn't have even a decade ago at 30. And also I seem to have a longer attention span than I used to (9am HN commenting notwithstanding). I have a much better sense of how long an implementation will take, what its blockers might be, etc.
IOW I'm liking work at 40, at least personally.