DevOps salaries rise as the skill set becomes more recognized
A new study by website security specialist Incapsula and community site DevOps.com shows that DevOps is rapidly becoming one of the hottest technology career paths.
DevOps -- a hybrid of development and operations -- is a recent field, recognizing that software development, quality assurance, and IT operations all depend on each other. It aims to help organizations rapidly produce software products and services and to improve operational performance.
The survey aims to find out more about this rapidly expanding field and polled hundreds of DevOps professionals across the world on their salary, title, daily duties, and level of education required for the job.
Writing on the Incapsula blog Dori Harpaz, director of marketing says, "As this is a relatively new field, we thought it would be enlightening to see how DevOps professionals define their own roles within their organization. Taking this one step further, we decided to not only explore what DevOps professionals do, but also how much they earn and the various factors that affect salaries in this field".
Findings include that 52 percent of respondents have a bachelor's degree, while 25 percent have a master's. However, the level of education completed doesn't affect salary, the results showed professionals with high school diplomas could earn salaries comparable to those with master’s degrees.
Those salaries are also increasing. More than 76 percent of respondents reported that their salaries increased in 2014 and 85 percent expect a further increase this year. Almost half of respondents also received a bonus last year.
There's also a direct correlation between the size of the DevOps team and median salary. Perhaps not surprisingly larger teams pay higher salaries. Companies of all sizes place strong value on DevOps though. The median salary for professionals working at companies with revenues less than $1m was $87,058, and at companies with more than $1b in revenue $118,867.
Other findings include that 65 percent of respondents work for North American companies, and that the field is overwhelmingly male dominated with 96 percent of respondents being men.
The full survey report is available to download from the Incapsula website.
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