The year 2020 upended life as we know it — yet amid worldwide shutdowns and cross-industry layoffs, the respondents to the 2020 State of DevOps survey reported an overall rise in salary levels compared to the past couple of years. While this finding initially took us by surprise, it began to make sense as we considered that our survey respondents are people working solely in technology roles — roles that became crucial to helping businesses digitally transform to survive the impact of the pandemic. Organizations across the world accelerated their digitization efforts in order to keep up with the new virtual way of life, causing them to competitively hire talent and build out their teams.

As our research has demonstrated over the last decade, organizations with more highly evolved DevOps practices are able to test and adopt new technologies more quickly, to experiment and innovate more effectively. We found that these companies also compensate their employees at a higher rate than companies with less evolved DevOps practices. Combining these key findings with the other data we collected allowed us to examine how salary levels correlate with factors such as geographic location, job title and department, gender, company size and industry. We also broke salaries into two groups — managers and practitioners.

In addition to the two findings cited above, I found these key findings especially interesting:

• More women than men earn mid-range salaries, but more men than women earn top salaries.
• The best-paid job title amongst practitioners was platform engineer.

If you want to discover more from the research and see where your salary ranks compared to your peers, please check out the 2020 DevOps Salary Report. As always, thank you to the respondents of the 2020 State of DevOps survey for sharing your knowledge with us!

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