Recent studies have found that DevOps positions in Canada and the United States are the highest in-demand. Stack Overflow, a developer community that releases a Salary Calculator tool annually to help growing developers better understand fair salaries, released a comprehensive report detailing how different programming positions are paid from country to country and skill to skill.
The survey—which has a high sample size of 90,000—found that, once again, the highest paid positions were in DevOps. Furthermore, it found that developers in the DevOps field were the happiest, compared to other developer positions (designers were among the least paid). In Canada and the USA, wages in this area have also gone up by five percent compared to last year.
For many who are following the DevOps movement, this may not be new news, but it further exemplifies the power of DevOps among tech businesses. To better understand why, it helps to analyze the DevOps philosophy. DevOps is a development method that integrates business operations with development teams, creating a cohesive workflow of communication between these important parties in an organization.
One of the primary goals of DevOps is to shorten the development lifecycle through automation. For example, in order to rise to competition, today’s tech businesses must be continuously delivering updates to keep their user base and clients happy. Modern tech businesses are achieving this with tools like Docker registry integration by jFrog, utilizing other cloud-based applications like Kubernetes and Helm, and using Git as a safe experimentation platform for deployment.
With these tools and platforms, organizations can push their applications forward quickly and efficiently, create stronger, enforced code, and streamline many internal processes. DevOps can also drastically reduce human error, and prevent feature or “scope creep,” which is when developers are overloaded with feature requested and fixes and cannot turn them around as quickly as they’re receiving them.
In a report conducted by LinkedIn last year, it also found that DevOps engineers were the most recruited position. Over the past few years, investors and recruiters have sparked interest in the DevOps culture movement. Another study from Indeed found that between 2014 and 2017, postings for DevOps engineers went up by 91%.
In short, DevOps is a combination of a methodology in mindset. In the past, developers worked in traditional, siloed environments where code was built and tested, and then passed off to the operations team for deployment, maintenance, and monitoring. The modern DevOps engineer does all of these things, and is responsible for code on an end-to-end process. The core responsibilities of a DevOps engineer varies depending on the company, though generally speaking, anyone with a DevOps title is put in place to develop better code at a faster pace on a continuous basis.
Aside from the tasks and processes mentioned, there are several reasons why DevOps remains a high paid and integral part of technology. For starters, it will remain an integral part of IT for the foreseeable future. Much of today’s development technology is moving to cloud-based applications, and in order to work with cloud-based platforms, you need a DevOps expert.
The processes and tools used within the DevOps process—like continuous delivery/continuous integration, Docker container usage, and automation—are also closely linked to return on investment for businesses. This means that businesses understand that can afford to pay DevOps engineers an average of $100,000 per year because they know the results will come back in dollars.
Everywhere in technology, DevOps is moving full steam ahead. And it’s this reason that investors are siphoning millions of dollars into DevOps startups. Developer-focused startups may have been a gamble in the past, but today, they play a major role in tech landscape.