The Open Source Jobs Report from The Linux Foundation and tech career hub, Dice, shows 60% demand for DevOps human resources among more than 2,000 IT open source professionals and IT hiring managers. DevOps skills were found to be in the top three most sought after open source skills (57%) along with cloud/virtualisation (60%) and application platforms (59%). The report notes that:
Cloud and DevOps work increasingly assumes Linux is running underneath. The most popular DevOps tools (Chef, Puppet and Ansible) were created as open source, with Windows support added later.
A growing number of companies are looking for full-time hires; 60% in 2017 versus 53% in 2016, but only 43% of hiring managers in 2017 report the economy is encouraging them to hire more, down from 57% in the previous year.
42% of companies are keen on adding DevOps skills to their hiring portfolio, with 50% of hiring managers more likely to hire a certified professional. 47% of companies will help pay for employees' certifications, representing an increase from from one-third a year ago. Only 21% say they definitely would not pay for certifications (down from 30% in 2016). 33% of managers report they have offered additional training and/or certification opportunities as an incentive to retain employees, up from 26% last year. 76% of open source professionals say certifications are useful to their careers.
DevOps engineer was amongst the most popular positions employers seek to fill, with 60% reporting them on their hiring schedule - the other two being developer at 73%, and systems administrator at 53%. Glassdoor recently ranked 'DevOps Engineer' as second in their 50 best jobs in America in 2018 report, but it's a job title the market finds difficult to agree on. Stepan Pushkarev, head of the DevOps practice at Squadex.com and CTO at Hydrosphere.io, recently wrote in his article 'Do Not Hire a DevOps Engineer':
If you think about it, the position of DevOps engineer doesn't really exist nor is it a position or a job title. Do not spend months in searching for mythical DevOps engineer.
Alison DeNisco Rayone at TechRepublic describes ten skills for DevOps engineers, whilst noting:
DevOps engineer came in at number three on Indeed's list of best jobs in America for 2017, in terms of salary, number of job postings, and opportunities for growth. These positions grew by 106% in the past few years, Indeed found, and boast an average base salary of $123,165.
In the same article, Matthew Boeckman, developer advocate at DevOps incident management and alerting platform, VictorOps, is quoted as saying:
While there are a raft of technical skills that may be required for any given environment, the reality of DevOps engineering is one of frequent change. Whether in deloyment pipelines, systems architecture, or incident management, a DevOps engineer will be constantly challenged by new technology, complex problems, or dynamic roles.
However, Matt Asay, head of developer ecosystem at Adobe, said in his column at The Register:
You can't buy or hire a mind-set. To everyone with DevOps in their job title: folks, you're doing it wrong. To every employer looking to fill positions like 'DevOps engineer': you, too, are miserably misguided. As it turns out: 'DevOps isn't a job title, a software tool, a team name, or magic enterprise fairy dust', as Slice's director of engineering Brian Guthrie (now at MeetUp) intones, but rather: 'a set of practices that encourage continuous integration into production.'