DevOps is coming up on its 10-year anniversary, and more industries across sectors are working to weave in the methodology. As the DevOps movement is increasing in popularity and demand across the country, these practitioners are becoming increasingly harder to find. “Yes, there is a huge DevOps skillset gap/shortage. This skills shortage is especially being felt by companies looking to hire DevOps engineers.” (P. Belagatti, 4 Jan 2019, thenewstack.com)
Why It Is Difficult to Hire for DevOps? | The skills and people who ignite DevOps — and fuel its evolution | Stack Overflow survey: DevOps engineers really content |
A recent survey from Stack Overflow found that those working in DevOps and Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) – are the most content with their roles and the least likely to look for new employment. Salaries, according to a Puppet survey of more than 3,000 technology professionals about DevOps salaries, continue to rise with the talent demand:
- DevOps practitioners and managers are commanding high salaries in the U.S, with 64% of survey respondents earning salaries higher than $100,000.
- Almost 20% earn between $150,000 and $250,000.
What else is hot in DevOps? Take note of these five trends to watch on job titles, skills, and organizational strategies:
1. Titles for DevOps professionals have been in flux from the start, but DevOps Engineer is beginning to emerge as clear frontrunner. Although some DevOps practitioners still dislike this title.
2. Companies demand multi-faceted professionals, making the shift from seeking I-shaped individuals — those with one specialization — to T-shaped professionals who still have a specialization, but also have broad expertise to cap it off.
3. Teams struggle to bring DevOps enterprise-wide with 22 percent forming DevOps teams on just a project-by-project basis. Many organizations do a great pilot project or two, then stumble. Culture change often proves to be the chief hurdle.
4. Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) gains buzz. In fact, 10 percent of survey respondents said they were recruiting site reliability engineers. While no one offers a concise definition of the approach, the founder of Google’s SRE team has described it as “what happens when a software engineer is tasked with what used to be called operations.”
5. DevSecOps approach wins over IT leaders. Frequently changing code, expanding attack surfaces, and a rapidly evolving threat landscape makes security a critical concern. Enter DevSecOps (or SecDevOps, or even Rugged DevOps), an approach that builds security into development and deployment workflows from the start.
As this movement increases in pace and momentum worldwide the challenge to lure and land top talent will become more difficult. We are focused on finding top DevOps practitioners and we can help.