From "Janitors" to the Fastest-Growing Job in Tech

When I got into operations back in 2010, my boss gave me a piece of advice that's stuck with me ever since:

"Ops people are like the janitors of business. You're not in the strategic conversations, and people don't really know you're there — unless there's a mess to clean up."

At the time, I was pretty disheartened by that. I found operations genuinely exciting, and I believed — even then — that it was a strategic function, not a support one. Being compared to a janitor felt like a demotion before I'd even gotten started.

Fast forward more than a decade, and Revenue Operations has become one of the fastest-growing job categories in the country.

That shift didn't happen by accident. As business has gotten more complex — more tools, more channels, more data, more handoffs between teams — the companies that win are the ones that can smash silos and align everyone around what actually matters: customers and revenue. That's not janitorial work. That's strategy, executed.

In my own career, I've been the person called in to optimize sales operations, product operations, customer operations, and — somewhat unexpectedly — talent marketing operations. The common thread across all of it: taking something fragmented or undefined and building a process that actually works, whether that means starting from scratch or fixing something broken.

The highest compliment I ever received in this line of work was being called someone's "Michael Clayton" — the fixer, the person you bring in when something needs to get sorted out, quietly and effectively.

Operations doesn't have the glamour that sales or marketing does. It's rarely the department people brag about on LinkedIn. But for the right kind of person — someone who actually enjoys untangling complexity — it's some of the most satisfying work in business. You're not managing perception. You're making things work.

If you're early in your career and someone tells you operations is a backwater, or if you're in ops right now and feeling like the "janitor" framing fits a little too well — I'd push back on both. The function has changed. The question is whether the people in it, and the companies they work for, have caught up to that yet.