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Good news if you’re an IT practitioner or manager, particularly in the US, but not so good if you’re a sysadmin; the latest examination of IT salaries from automation and cloud software provider Puppet has found that more than half of IT bods in the US earn more than $100,000 per year, while manager salaries have gone ‘off the chart’.
The latest DevOps salary report, which garnered responses from more than 4,600 IT professionals, argues that the percentage of US managers earning more than $150,000 went up to 43% in 2016, from 26% last year, while 34% of sysadmins earn more than $100,000 – lower on average than other common IT practitioner jobs. The number of IT practitioners earning more than $100,000 has gone up to 58% from 47% over the past 12 months.
IT practitioners earn more in the US than in Australia, New Zealand and Canada, with the most common salary range in the US being $100,000 to $125,000 compared to a lower bracket for the latter three countries.
The research also found that the more servers IT teams manage, the more money you’re likely to earn. The cut-off point appears to be 5,000 servers; those who manage more are on average earning between $100,000 and $125,000, while those who manage less are more likely to be on $75,000 to $100,000.
Nigel Kersten, CIO of Puppet, argued that the survey results reveal the need to hire the best talent. “Today, software is everywhere and is the driver of every business. For organisations to compete in this new world, they need to enable a frictionless delivery of high quality software,” said Kersten.
“This year’s DevOps salary report shows that organisations are realising the pressures of these dynamics and are pushing to hire, retain and manage the best IT teams to gain a strong competitive advantage,” he added.
Previous research has shown the issues associated with tech skills – and how much they cost organisations. A study from Indeed.com earlier this year found that DevOps engineer was the hardest IT job to fill in North America, while the latest State of the Cloud report from RightScale found that DevOps and Docker skill sets continue to rise.