DevOps Salaries Surge

DevOps programmers are making bank.

The number of U.S. “IT practitioners” reporting annual salaries above $100,000 jumped by 11 percentage points, according to software engineering firm Puppet.

Released earlier this week, the 2016 survey results confirm just how valuable software and network engineers are. The percentage of IT practitioners making more than $100,000 rose to 58 percent this year after staying the same from 2014 to 2015.

What DevOps Means

DevOps is a blend of “development” and “operations.” For a long time, the people who wrote software and the people who ran it on servers worked in separate teams, and code was handed over the wall from one to the other. DevOps tries to close that gap. Developers and operations staff share responsibility for getting software into production and keeping it running.

In practice, that means a lot of automation: automated testing, automated deployment, and infrastructure that’s set up by code rather than by hand. Puppet sits right in the middle of that shift. Its tools let teams describe how their servers should be configured and then apply that description automatically, an approach now usually called “infrastructure as code.”

That’s why a salary report from Puppet carries some weight. The company’s customers are exactly the teams hiring DevOps engineers, and Puppet had been surveying them for years through its annual State of DevOps research.

Tech Pay Versus the Wider Economy

The results help to back up assertions that software is eating the world and that tech is one of the few industries creating net job growth. Wages in the broader economy aren’t keeping up with the stand-out growth in tech salaries.

For example, Economic Policy Institute pegged overall private sector nominal wage growth in the U.S. at 3.5 to 4.0 percent in its most recent update. That’s down from the average growth rate of 6.3 percent, as reported by the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, from 1960 to 2016.

Job titles in the Puppet survey’s IT practitioner category include “DevOps engineer,” “software developer or engineer,” and “cloud or infrastructure architect.”

Where the Money Was in 2016

Other highlights from the 2016 survey:

• Highest earners: IT practitioners in the Australia/New Zealand region, the United States, and Canada.
• Best industries: If you’re in the United States, our data shows that you’re more likely to make a better salary if you are a tech practitioner in technology, finance, or healthcare.

• Lowest paid regions: Asia, Eastern Europe, and the Latin America/Caribbean region.

The regional split is worth noting. Salary surveys like this one report what people earn where they live, so a lower figure in one region doesn’t necessarily mean the work is valued less. Living costs, exchange rates and local demand all play a part. What the 2016 numbers did show clearly is that the U.S., Canada and Australia/New Zealand were competing hard for the same pool of automation and cloud skills.

What Happened Next

The demand didn’t fade. In Stack Overflow’s 2024 Developer Survey, DevOps specialists in the United States reported a median salary of $145,000 a year, well clear of the $100,000 line that 58 percent of Puppet’s respondents had crossed in 2016. Across all of the survey’s respondents worldwide, the median for DevOps specialists was about $72,600, which echoes Puppet’s finding that where you work makes a big difference to what you earn.

The research behind those early reports also grew up. Until 2018, the State of DevOps research was run in partnership between Puppet and a team known as DevOps Research and Assessment, or DORA. DORA is now a program run by Google Cloud and still publishes its own research on software delivery, while Puppet has continued its own reports.

Puppet itself changed hands. In April 2022, Perforce Software signed an agreement to acquire Puppet for an undisclosed sum. At the time, Perforce said more than 40,000 organizations had used Puppet’s open source and commercial tools, and described Puppet as an early developer of what’s now called infrastructure as code. “This acquisition expands our product offering by adding new capabilities for enterprise DevOps teams to manage and secure their critical infrastructure,” Perforce CEO Mark Ties said.

What It Means for Startups

For founders, the takeaway from 2016 still holds: people who can automate how software is built, tested and shipped are expensive, and they’ve stayed that way. A startup competing with banks and big tech companies for the same engineers usually can’t win on salary alone.

That makes a few things worth thinking about early. Lean on managed cloud services and off-the-shelf automation tools where you can, so you need fewer specialists to keep the lights on. Build good habits, like version control for infrastructure and automated testing, before the team grows, because they’re much harder to add later. And when you do hire for DevOps, be clear about what you can offer beyond pay, whether that’s equity, ownership of real systems, or the chance to set things up properly from the start.

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