Comment by Ali Doruk Baykal on "What kind of skills does DevOps require, and what is the kind of work you get to do?"

I believe it depends of the software architecture but operating system knowledge would not be sufficient.

First of all you need some basic code structure knowledge to identify deployable components of a software. For example you need to know the directory structure and necessary configurations for a Java Web Application to run on Unix. If it is a .NET application then you need to know if this is an MVC app or .NET Web Forms app. You need to understand the main differences between language run times and frameworks that the software uses.
Then you need some knowledge about code repositories (git, svn etc.) to maintain code. DevOps engineers need to know about branching and merging mechanisms.
Also you need to know how this software is deployed, configured and run in the OS layer.

I believe DevOps engineers should be the ones that have a lot of experience in software development and also maintained it system wise.

Edit: There is a toolchain given in Wikipedia that summarizes DevOps actions.

Code – Code development and review, Version control tools, code merging

Build – continuous integration tools, build status

Test – Test and results determine performance

Package – Artifact repository, application pre-deployment staging

Release – Change management, release approvals, release automation

Configure – Infrastructure configuration and management, Infrastructure as Code tools

Monitor – Applications performance monitoring, end user experience

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