Atleast in my experience (ISP/DC world) most operational people where expected to do troubleshooting which at some points, results in one having to program to get to the nitty gritty efficiently. At a certain scale, issues start to creep up that are hard if not impossible to troubleshoot without atleast some programming and CS experience.
Are operational people developers? Not in the traditional sense, but the development of specific tools is required to efficiently keep the lights running.
A good example of this is troubleshooting packet loss. In a large network, this can become very difficult to pinpoint because more then a few dozen hops exist, and packets drop seem to occur randomly.
Without tooling to gather this data from different points in the network and doing statistics on it, it becomes nearly impossible to get a clear picture and troubleshoot efficiently.