The way out for operation and maintenance engineers

Where is the way out for operation and maintenance engineers?

Do you often hear the operation and maintenance personnel around you complaining about where their way out is? Don't worry, let me tell you, operation and maintenance personnel are like the "panacea" of the IT world. They repair servers like "repairmen", respond to sudden failures like "firefighters", and optimize the system like "magicians" performance. Whether it is cloud computing, the Internet of Things or artificial intelligence, operation and maintenance personnel will continue to shine on the road of technological development!

1. The age of 35 is the half-life of operation and maintenance. Is it really so?

The work in the IT industry is intensive and physically demanding, and operation and maintenance is no exception. System deployment and upgrades must not only be fast, but also avoid business peak periods. They often reverse black and white, maintain the current system during the day, and deploy new systems at night, switch or parallel , or even stay up all night, or do it during weekends and holidays at staggered times.

When a system failure occurs, the pressure is high, and repairs are rushed against time, day and night, and sleep and food are difficult to rest.

Therefore, engaging in operation and maintenance work not only requires sufficient physical strength, but also requires being able to work at night and on weekends. It also requires continuous learning and adapting to new systems.

This is generally not a problem for college graduates and young people who have not yet started a family.

But for 35-year-old practitioners, there will be many problems.

Because at this stage of production, we usually shoulder double responsibilities. Not only are there elderly people who need to be taken care of, but most of them are married, and they have children who need to be accompanied. Before the children go to high school, they need to be picked up and dropped off from school on Mondays and Fridays, accompanied by food, play, sleep, homework tutoring, and parent-child travel on weekends and weekends; After children enter high school, they usually live on campus, and they still need to interact with their parents on weekends and share their family life. As a result, not only is it difficult to match working time with operation and maintenance work, but there may also be a gap in investment in learning time.

As a result, there is a phenomenon called the half-life of operation and maintenance at the age of 35.

In fact, for 35-year-old practitioners, this situation will occur not only in operation and maintenance work, but also in other occupations that require overtime work at night or on holidays.

Therefore, a survey conducted by Zhaopin Recruitment in 2021 showed that 80.1% of middle-aged and elderly job seekers believe that the biggest difficulty in finding a job is the age limit.

Direction 2: How to smoothly transition half-life

2. What are the ways to cross the career threshold of 35 years old?

For operation and maintenance engineers aged 35-40, they need to balance work and family. To this end, efforts can be made in the following aspects:

• Take the time to learn new technologies to stay employable
• It is recommended to use a stable system to reduce the operation and maintenance workload
• In-depth study of current systems to enhance work voice
• Tune the system as well as possible to reduce the system failure rate
• Actively introduce artificial intelligence AI to improve the system’s self-healing rate
• Understand the new business system in advance to shorten the deployment and switching period

Specifically, to improve operation and maintenance efficiency, there are the following 10 suggestions:

1. Automation: Use automation tools to automate daily repetitive tasks, such as automated deployment, automated monitoring, automated alarms, etc., which can greatly reduce manual operation time and error rates.

2. Standardization: Establish standardized operation and maintenance processes and specifications to enable team members to work in the same way and improve work efficiency and quality.

3. Knowledge management: Establish knowledge bases, document bases, etc., and update and maintain them regularly to facilitate team members to find and share knowledge, avoid duplication of work, and improve problem-solving efficiency.

4. Monitoring and early warning: Establish an effective monitoring system, including monitoring of servers, networks, applications, etc., and set up corresponding early warning mechanisms to discover and solve problems in a timely manner to avoid the occurrence and impact of failures.

5. Continuous improvement: Regularly review and evaluate work processes and efficiency, identify problems and bottlenecks, and formulate improvement plans to continuously improve the efficiency and quality of operation and maintenance work.

6. Self-service: Provide a self-service platform, such as self-service recovery, self-service resource application, etc., which can reduce the workload of the operation and maintenance team and improve user satisfaction.

7. Teamwork: Establish a good teamwork atmosphere, strengthen communication and collaboration, and improve work efficiency and problem-solving abilities.

8. Skills training: Continuously improve the skills and knowledge levels of operation and maintenance team members, and continuously improve individual and team capabilities and work efficiency through training and certification.

9. Optimize resource management: Properly plan and manage resources, such as servers, networks, storage, etc., to avoid resource waste and bottlenecks and improve resource utilization and efficiency.

10. Way of thinking: Cultivate team members’ innovative thinking and problem-solving abilities, encourage team members to proactively think and propose improvements, and promote innovation and efficiency in operation and maintenance work.