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Tag: Salaries

  • Survey: Most Open Source Software Maintainers Want to Get Paid

    Survey: Most Open Source Software Maintainers Want to Get Paid

    A survey of 339 maintainers of open source software projects found 60% of them classified themselves as unpaid hobbyists versus only 13% who said they earn most or all of their income from maintaining projects. Slightly less than a quarter (23%) described themselves as semi-professionals, earning some of their income from maintaining projects. Overall, more than three-quarters of unpaid maintainers (77%) would prefer to be paid for their efforts.

    The survey was conducted by Tidelift, a provider of a platform for managing open source software use, and found there is a clear correlation between getting paid and the amount of time spent actually maintaining a project. A full 81% of professional maintainers spend more than 20 hours per week maintaining their projects, compared to 27% of semi-professional maintainers and only 7% of unpaid hobbyist maintainers, the survey finds.

    In fact, paid maintainers are much more likely to have reproducible and verifiable build processes (77%), formal backward compatibility policy (71%), a security disclosure plan (69%), provide fixes and recommendations for vulnerabilities (69%) and have a defined dependency management process (57%).

    Unfortunately, the survey also made it clear that more than half of maintainers of open source software projects (52%) are not even aware of emerging frameworks to better secure software.

    On the plus side, however, the survey also found that among maintainers that are aware of those frameworks 43% have already begun work to align with them or plan to start within the next year. Alas, 39% said they have no plans to align to these industry standards, while another 19% are still on the fence. Well over one-third of maintainers (38%) who do not plan to align their projects with industry standards said they just don’t have the time, while 37% won’t do it because they are not being paid for the work.

    Nearly half of maintainers (47%) want to be paid for undertaking the work needed to align their projects with the security frameworks, with 54% of maintainers noting they would appreciate help that would enable them to better understand these frameworks and how they apply to their project.

    Tidelift CEO Donald Fischer said as more organizations are concerned about the security of the open source software used across software supply chains, the survey makes it clear that maintainers need some sort of financial compensation to make it worth their time and effort to address vulnerabilities in a timely manner. That’s especially critical, especially as legislation is pending that would hold software developers more liable for vulnerabilities in software. In the absence of being paid to more proactively address vulnerabilities, many open source software maintainers may abandon projects altogether because of liability concerns.

    It’s not clear to how enterprise IT organizations are evaluating which open source projects developers can use based on the level of support made available. What is clear is that not all open source software is created and supported equally well. Of course, many of the organizations benefitting from open source software could be doing a lot more—not just in terms of financial support, but also helping with everything from identifying vulnerabilities and testing patches to simply writing better documentation.

  • ‘DevOps Engineer’ Title Lands in Top 5 of Dice Salary Survey

    ‘DevOps Engineer’ Title Lands in Top 5 of Dice Salary Survey

    The position of DevOps Engineer is gaining some serious respect, and with that comes cash.

    In Dice’s recently released “2019 Tech Salary Report,” DevOps Engineer now ranks in the Top 5 of all tech salaries, with an average of $111,683. The survey is based on the responses of 10,780 technology professionals conducted between Oct. 22 and Dec. 13, 2018.

    It’s the first time that the title of DevOps Engineer has appeared in the Top 5, according to Dice. The one caveat is that the position might not be as popular as the annual salary suggests; rather, more professionals now identify with this position.

    What it does mean is that the DevOps Engineer title is now ranked with more established tech titles, including senior leadership positions CEO, CIO, Vice President and Director, with an average salary of $142,063; System Architect, at $129,952; Tech Management, including Strategist and Architect, at $127,121; and Product Manager, at $114,174.

    Overall, the average salary for tech workers remained relatively flat year over year. In 2018, the average salary totaled $93,244, a less than 1 percent increase from 2017, when the average salary stood at $92,712, according to Dice.

    In an email, Dice CTO Klavs Miller noted that the increasing use and adoption of various cloud-based technologies is pushing enterprises to invest more in DevOps engineers to take advantage of that compute power to develop new apps.

    “Many DevOps Engineer job requirements include a heavy focus on the creation of infrastructure as code, essentially transforming operations into the management of codebases that create infrastructure (in cloud services or native cloud infrastructure rather than servers and hardware),” Miller wrote. “We are also seeing and experiencing first-hand that more and more organizations are moving toward having combined development and operations teams around a domain, rather than splitting along traditional functional lines.”

    In his email, Miller noted that while there might be few tech pros that use the “DevOps Engineer” title, it doesn’t mean that there’s an actual lack of engineers with the skills to help enterprises with their DevOps projects.

    Instead, it’s a matter of looking for talent that might already be there.

    “There is probably a shortage of talent that label themselves as ‘DevOps Engineers,’ but employers should look at the skills required by those roles instead,” Miller noted.

    “There’s a growing demand for a skill that is still evolving with market trends,” he added. “As an example, DevOps is not nearly as common as its more common sibling, software engineers, but it has become more popular each year according to our salary survey and among employers who are sourcing Dice for these positions.”

    The types of enterprises looking for DevOps talent are varied. Right now, insurance company Geico and hardware store giant Lowe’s are each looking for specific DevOps titles, according to Dice.

    If private business isn’t your area, the Louisiana Economic Development agency is currently advertising for an entry-level DevOps position.

    In addition to specific tech titles, the Dice report shows that several types of programming languages that are now associated with the DevOps discipline are commanding significant salaries in the market.

    For instance, those with expertise in Google’s Golang programming language can command salaries of up to $132,827, according to the Dice survey.

    A little further down the line, and keeping with Miller’s emphasis on cloud-based technologies driving much of the DevOps conversation, those with knowledge of Amazon’s DynamoDB and Redshift can command salaries of more than $125,000 on average, the study found.

    Additionally, platform-as-a-service (PaaS) skills can net a developer an annual salary of more than $122,000.

    In his email, Miller noted that it’s difficult to draw a direct line between needs for certain programming languages and the growing popularity of DevOps. The growing reliance on cloud and the types of digital transformation projects enterprises are engaged with now show how the market has shifted.

    “There are some assumptions that we can’t confirm, but DevOps shares programming languages with other roles that are also in demand, as employers adopt cloud-based technology and open source becomes more pervasive in companies’ tech stacks,” Miller added.

    — Scott Ferguson