Is Operations a Promising Career? Insights from Small Firms to BAT

Is Operations (Ops) a Promising Career?

This is a theoretical yet practical topic that many must face.

Drawing on my experiences at a small startup, Baidu, and Alibaba, as well as classmates at Tencent and Xiaomi, I discuss the outlook for operations technology in the future internet landscape.

Through this article you will understand the differences between small‑company and large‑company Ops, their development trends, and why Ops is increasingly technical and well‑paid.

Conclusion: Operations is a very promising (and lucrative) career, and its technical depth is growing. Colleagues at BAT with three years of experience typically earn 20k–40k RMB per month and often hold technical lead or team‑lead roles.

Ops work is demanding, but the key is whether you can learn and apply better technologies to earn more in the future.

Why Do People Feel Ops Lacks Technical Content?

Ops often lacks clear goal planning and task decomposition, making many tasks appear non‑technical.

The breadth of responsibilities prevents deep expertise and a clear competitive edge.

Insufficient documentation and presentation limit skill growth.

Ops teams frequently have little voice in technical decisions, receiving limited recognition.

In large companies, Ops handles foundational work such as service deployment, system installation, hardware, networking, OS, databases, storage, and open‑source tools. Responsibilities also include configuring LDAP, Samba, Nagios, stress testing, performance tuning, kernel parameter adjustment, and incident investigation. Because Ops covers many layers, tasks often become merely “checking boxes” without deep research.

What Do BAT Ops Engineers Actually Do?

At BAT, Ops functions are more specialized: system, database, and application Ops are separated, leading to narrower but deeper focus.

Ops primarily drives three goals: availability, efficiency improvement, and cost control, tightly aligned with product and development objectives. Most work is derived from these goals.

Technical work includes designing clear, fast incident response plans, proactive monitoring, rapid problem mitigation, and transparent information disclosure.

Approach to Work

Data‑driven targets (e.g., 99.99% availability, MTTR < 20 min) guide strict planning, regular reviews, and detailed task breakdowns.

Collaboration with external resources and a holistic view help solve problems beyond isolated incidents.

Key Directions for Ops Growth

Find a platform with sufficient scale to practice and showcase Ops skills.

Deeply understand the business you support.

Continuously discover and think about Ops‑related technical and architectural challenges.

Adopt a global perspective to solve common problems, not just isolated tickets.

For example, when a disk is nearing full capacity, a basic response is to delete files. A higher‑level response identifies whether the issue is isolated or widespread, determines root cause, and implements a solution that prevents future alerts while preserving critical data.

Ultimately, effective Ops engineers leverage knowledge of systems, networks, hardware, standards, and services to devise technical solutions that developers and testers cannot, building tools, platforms, and frameworks that add real value to the organization.