Want a salary bump? Try platform engineering.

Let’s get bakin’ 🥐

Platform engineers vs. DevOps engineers: Who makes more?

Platform engineering is getting more hype... and more money 💸 in the pockets of people who make the switch from DevOps.

A few months ago, we ran a small survey in the Platform Engineering Community. We focused on the United States, Canada, and Europe.

In the survey, we asked some questions to better understand the current state of platform engineering: what tech folks are working with, the average salary, and if the job is in-person or fully remote.

Here’s what we found:

1. Want to get the big bucks? 💰 Be a platform engineer in North America.

Across the board, platform engineers earn more on average than their DevOps engineers peers. The gap is almost 9,4% in North America and doubles that – 19,4% – in Europe.

Why is this the case? Companies are realizing that building a platform adds more value to their bottom line. Employees with the right experience (and product mindset) are hard to find, harder than your typical DevOps engineer. 😉

2. Kubernetes and Infrastructure as Code (IaC) lead the pack in the most used technologies for platformers.

This shouldn’t come as a huge surprise. Platforms are normally built as a layer on top of clusters and infrastructure, streamlining both configuration management and infrastructure orchestration.

3. In-office is out, flexible work is in. 🎉

Good news for folks who like taking meetings in sweatpants: platform engineers are at the forefront of the remote work revolution! In North America, platform engineers are overwhelmingly remote. In Europe, it’s still pretty flexible with a balanced split between fully remote and hybrid options.

However you slice it, 100% in-office is 100% dead.

Want to get in on the next big thing? Check out our YouTube channel to learn the best platform engineering experts like Cloud Strategy Author Gregor Hohpe, Team Topologies Co-Author Manuel Pais, OpenCredo CEO Nicki Watt, and Puppet Field CTO Nigel Kersten 👇

Short on time? ⏳ We got you 🥐😋

🥐 Software scalability is one of the components improving developer velocity. Jesse Chen shares his thoughts.

🥐 Interesting read from Jay Cuthrell about DevEx, DevOps, platform engineering, and the importance of a cloud platform foundation with developer goal landing zones. Check it out.

🥐 DevOps is Dead 💀 Long live platform engineering! Don't agree? Aeris Stewart explains it all in their latest article for The New Stack.

🥐 The memes are back! I know you missed them 😉

That's a wrap on #8. They say sharing is caring, so share the platform care with your friends 🤗

This newsletter is a community effort, so if you have anything awesome to share from the cloud-native world, send it our way. You can share your ideas here.

Until next week!

Stay crunchy 🥐

Luca