Hey there! This is Platform Weekly, your weekly peek behind the platform engineering curtain👀

It’s Official: Platform Engineers Earn More Than You

This week’s edition of Platform Weekly is based on my friend and colleague Carrie Tang’s latest article on The New Stack. Read the full article here.

If you’re reading this newsletter there is a good chance that you are a platform engineer, or at least interested in platform engineering and if so, it’ll be no surprise to you that platform engineers make more than DevOps - but exactly how much is the key question.

I can talk all day about the issues with DevOps and the primacy of Platform Engineering, but in the end, we’re numbers people. And we want to see the actual numbers.

Fortunately for me, I have access to the awesome community around this newsletter, and on the platform engineering community Slack. We’re talking about almost 15,000 platform engineers! And of course because it’s me, I couldn’t help get DevOps salary too to make my favorite comparison😉

So as part of the State of Platform Engineering volume 2 this year, it was really important to me to figure out those exact numbers.

Last year, in the first edition of this report, there was a clear difference, but this time the numbers are actually insane. In the US, platform engineers have a 42.5% salary advantage, averaging an additional $65,439 over people with DevOps in their title. It’s slightly less extreme in Europe, but the trend there continues with platform engineers earning 18.64% more - an extra $15,871 annually​.

Why? And what does this mean for the industry? Well, I’ll let Carrie tell you that.

Quick bites

P.s Can you believe this was my most contentious meme of 2023?

Articles that blew me away: 

• 5 Ways Your Organization Can Benefit From Platform Engineering
• GitHub Developer Productivity at 30 Billion Messages per Day

From the community:

• Maybe you can answer this question?