Is Operations Really the Lowest‑Skill Role in IT? Insights from Zhihu Users

Technical Scope of Operations (Ops) in IT

Operations engineers are responsible for the stability, scalability, and observability of production systems. Their work evolves from ad‑hoc scripting in small teams to managing complex, automated infrastructure in mature organizations.

Evolution of Ops Responsibilities in Small Startups

In early‑stage companies a developer often doubles as the ops person, treating the work as trivial. As the business grows, the ops role must address several technical challenges:

Identify and isolate chaotic environments (e.g., mixing test and production resources).

Introduce container orchestration platforms such as Kubernetes to standardize deployment.

Implement centralized logging (e.g., ELK stack ) and metrics collection (e.g., Prometheus + Grafana ).

Document processes, runbooks, and configuration standards.

Automate release pipelines using tools like Jenkins or GitLab CI.

These changes typically occur incrementally over several months, requiring systematic migration and extensive testing.

Core Infrastructure Skills Expected from Ops Engineers

Modern ops engineers are expected to master a full stack of infrastructure technologies, including:

Deploying and troubleshooting Kubernetes clusters without errors.

Building private or public clouds with OpenStack .

Setting up distributed data processing frameworks such as Hadoop .

Customizing monitoring solutions (e.g., writing prometheus.yml rules, configuring alertmanager).

Designing and maintaining CI/CD pipelines (Jenkins, GitLab CI, GitHub Actions) for automated builds, tests, and deployments.

Proficiency in these areas usually requires years of focused learning and hands‑on experience.

Typical Daily Ops Tasks Encountered by Development Teams

Even teams that focus on client‑side development rely on ops for a variety of routine tasks:

Creating Universal Links by preparing a JSON configuration file.

Updating ad‑network configuration files such as ads‑app.txt.

Diagnosing network connectivity issues when API requests fail to reach backend services.

Maintaining private package repositories (e.g., Maven, npm) and handling access control.

These tasks illustrate the breadth of operational support required across the software lifecycle.

Operational Challenges and Documentation

As services scale, ops engineers must continuously address:

Resource exhaustion and capacity planning (CPU, memory, storage).

Performance bottlenecks and root‑cause analysis of incidents.

Security hardening, patch management, and compliance auditing.

Extensive documentation of architecture diagrams, runbooks, and standard operating procedures.

When the architecture stabilizes, the visible workload may decrease, but the underlying systems remain dependent on the ops team for reliability and future scaling.