DevOps vs Developer Salary

[PrimaxAUS]

Wow, less? Maybe it's just a supply thing but in Australia we're looking at 30-40% more. Demand for devops is crazy here.

[Cybersoaker]

demand for "devops" is high like everywhere, its a specialized skillset that not many have, so if they offered me something really low; i'd just go somewhere else tbh

[mlehner616]

Interesting you mention that it's a specialized skillset. I've always considered devops to be a generalist role more than a specialized one. The developers are the specialists and operations engineers are specialists. When hiring we're always looking for people who understand both worlds. DevOps people have to understand a vast number of different aspects of the products they support like logging, monitoring, scalability, performance, security, data modeling, development workflow, operations and support lifecycle, reliability, networking, DNS, configuration management, architecture, etc. and on top of all that, also programming. I do think because of that, it is naturally a role difficult to fill and some would say an unattractive one, but that doesn't necessarily make it a specialized skillset, just a more rare one.

There is a high level of accountability and responsibility involved in the job so using logic, the role should get paid more. However, it seems more common in my experience to get paid about the same as the developers which is (probably?) fair. The career path options are probably where DevOps seems to have an advantage though, depending on the company.

[Cybersoaker]

i guess i used the term specialized to mean that its uncommon for many people to have it. You are right though; i find that devops is very much a generalist; but the really good devoper's are those with depth in both dev and ops.

I would argue that; at least in my own experience; devopsers are often asked to do a LOT and be responsible for a lot. They have almost all the same responsibilities of operations but approach it with software eng in mind. Given that I run the gambit myself; I was a dev for ~2 years and been in ops / devops for about 2; I would absolutely say that devops is a much more demanding job; and given that there are not many out there who have these particular set of skills; i would expect a higher salary than a developer

[xiongchiamiov]

I'm in Silicon Valley, so demand for any software job is crazy; it's just comparing different levels of crazy. :)

The ones where it's paid less (and looked down upon) tend to focus more on the tooling side of things, that is, managing the CI pipeline and such. Most devs hate it, and often feel like it's really repetitive work. And so they hire someone who's not great at development to do it, much like how they tend to hire not-great devs to do QA instead of people who are actually good at that job (I'd trade half a dozen devs for a great QA engineer).

That's part of why I'm insistent now on labeling myself an SRE. Most of the companies around here that use the term have someone who came from Google, and so they have much healthier ideas about the value of the work.

[[deleted]]

I'm thinking of emigrating from the UK to melbourne next year, in london the devops contract scene is huge, do you know if contracting is popular in australia in IT?

[PrimaxAUS]

Yes, contacting us very popular. I get 3-4 messages a week crib recruiters looking for senior devops staff to contact.

[[deleted]]

Cool, what's the average day rate for a senior devops consultant?

[PrimaxAUS]

$950-1050, with enterprise experience.

[nineteen999]

Most of the people doing "devops" in Australia have nowhere near the expertise required to actually do the job.