From Rookie to Ops Manager: Key Lessons on Linux, Infrastructure, and Career Growth

I have been working for several years, starting as a complete beginner and gradually becoming an experienced operations professional.

In college I majored in Electronic Information Engineering and took an elective called “Linux Basics Tutorial.” It was my first exposure to Linux; I spent days installing a Linux system and learning basic commands such as

mkdir

,

cp

, and

cd

, discovering the joy of controlling a system through a text interface.

Some people prefer graphical interfaces, but I compare it to choosing between a manual and an automatic car—each has its own sense of control and convenience.

During my senior year I felt uncertain about my future, so I moved to Guangzhou with a few classmates. Lacking a clear skill set, I took an entry‑level operations role at an e‑commerce company that paid 3,500 CNY during probation and 4,000 CNY after confirmation. Living costs were high, and the salary barely covered basic expenses.

In my first company I moved computers, cut network cables, helped colleagues with network issues, managed switches and routers, administered servers, deployed applications, and performed updates . I was a hybrid of network admin, handyman, and junior ops engineer. I learned to think through problems before asking for help, to avoid being seen as unreflective. After a year, when the department head left, I was promoted to ops supervisor, which became both pressure and motivation. After completing a major B2B project, I resigned, ending my first job.

My second job was as an ops manager at a ride‑hailing and finance company. On day one I found the environment chaotic: no ops team, servers managed by a network admin, production servers running on physical machines with the MySQL port 3306 exposed to the internet, and no basic monitoring. Together with a colleague we built an ops department, set up monitoring, and gradually transformed the physical‑machine setup into a private‑cloud environment, a process that took nearly a year.

From these years I distilled three simple lessons:

When you lack skills, choose any work that lets you learn, even if it feels like “handyman” tasks.

When you have some ability, go beyond merely using a technology (e.g., MySQL); understand its underlying principles and continuously learn new technologies.

When you are capable, evaluate whether the environment aligns with your growth goals; staying for salary alone is insufficient—look for a place where you can demonstrate value and help the team advance.

I started this article to share operations experience and offer gentle reminders to those entering or already in the ops field.

This article is from “Operations Life”. Original URL: http://www.ywadmin.com/?id=6