Same here - my first programming jobs were low-level (working for a compiler company, then a 3D graphics company), but over time I switched from being a developer to being a sysadmin at a largish hosting company.

These days I'm all "devops" / "cloud engineer", and people seem surprised that I write utilities to automate my work and infrastructure.

It seems that people familiar with cloud-stuff often lack a developer-background, and don't understand how things really work.