There's a joke in the industry: the more advanced the Ops, the more like an invisible man! So the owner is experiencing confusion, provide your own ability it!

When it comes to O&M, most of them are recruited by Party A, and Party B is usually R&D and implementation. After the end of the project Party A needs O&M. From the grassroots positions, the division of labor between O&M and development (including product managers) is still quite large.

I have been doing software development for many years, usually the main consideration of functional and non-functional implementation, operation and maintenance is responsible for the system on line after the system's stable and efficient operation. So there is a big difference in the technology required.

Development focuses on a variety of development languages, development frameworks, continuous integration environment, software engineering, algorithms, and the corresponding business, etc., the underlying operating environment is not too much to worry about, especially on the cloud environment, less and less to worry about load balancing, high availability of these non-functional requirements.

Operation and maintenance focuses on the various environments in which the system operates, ranging from the server room, network, storage, physical machines, virtual machines, and these more basic architectures, to databases, middleware platforms, cloud platforms, and big data platforms, and the emphasis is not on programming, but on the use and management of such platforms.

So development is heavy on construction, and operations and maintenance is, of course, maintenance. So it's understandable that O&M is more under-appreciated than development, it's hard to shine, and not getting into trouble is an achievement, even though the effort put in isn't quite as much, if not more. Read the product operation people said a sentence "do not care what the development of the garbage products, to retain customers is the operation and maintenance of concern"

But in the high-level considerations, although the operation and maintenance of the degree of importance is still less than the degree of development, but not only to consider as soon as possible to meet the business needs of the problem. Infrastructure is becoming more and more vocal. On the one hand, it's true that this is a very costly thing to do (money talks). Development of a system is not a code can run, to maintain a server room (especially high-end server room), often the investment must be hundreds of millions of dollars, thousands of servers is not so easy to manage, the annual depreciation, scrap is also money ah, photoelectricity is enough to raise a few senior RD. On the other hand, the infrastructure, especially after the cloud, but also to constrain the development of the language and program structure. There is also more and more attention to security management, is a huge investment, and even rise to the level of stability.

But in general, operations and maintenance engineers are the back office of IT, and IT is the back office of the general business. So, important yes, but probably never as valued as RD. Of course, a small portion of Ops is also highly valued, such as manufacturing, but it's a minority after all.

So, it operation and maintenance engineers choose there is no turning back, try to provide their own ability is the king!