Puppet’s Seventh Annual DevOps Salary Report Finds Gender Salary Gap is Decreasing while Global Salary Competition is Rising

Puppet, the industry standard for infrastructure automation, today revealed the findings of its 2021 DevOps Salary Report. Puppet surveyed more than 2,600 technology professionals globally and found significant growth across high-income wage brackets. Specifically, the data reveals that women are steadily increasing their earning status across regions, roles, and industries. The research also indicates that other countries are catching up to the U.S. in high salary pay.

“It is exciting to see more women increasingly enter higher income brackets, especially in DevOps, which has historically been a male-dominated area,” said Abby Kearns, chief technology officer at Puppet. “The gradual decrease in a wage gap hopefully points to a long-term shift in pay equity. As a DevOps leader, I am inspired by this progression and I look forward to seeing more equality in wages and gender parity across DevOps overall.”

The Great Resignation and pandemic-driven digital transformation efforts have directly impacted the DevOps landscape. These transformational enterprise shifts have forced companies to offer more competitive compensation and invest in top talent to ensure sustainable success. As a result, the 2021 DevOps Salary Report found that more workers are moving into higher income levels than at any time in the past three years. In addition, companies with high-evolution DevOps are compensating their employees at the highest level, with more managers and practitioners entering the salary group earning more than $150,000.

“This year, for the first time, we asked respondents to identify not only with a job title, but with a team, given the rise in collaboration across the DevOps sector,” said Ronan Keenan, research director at Puppet. “Interestingly, development/engineering teams earn the bulk of higher salaries, between $150,000 to $250,000, when compared to other groups. This also remains consistent with platform engineers being found to be the best-paid title amongst respondents for the second consecutive year.”

Key findings revealed in the DevOps Salary Report also include:

- The salary gap between male and female practitioners is closing within higher income brackets, as women make a steady, potentially long-term shift into higher earnings. More than double the number of women entered the higher income level of $150,000-plus than the year before (17% in 2021 compared to 8% in 2020 and 10% in 2019).

- The European job market remained quite stable despite recent pandemic-driven periods of disruption, driving increased competition with the US. In fact, countries like France are experiencing notable wage growth. In France, 45% of technology workers (managers and practitioners) earned $75,000-plus in 2021, compared to 38% in 2019.

- Companies at a high level of DevOps evolution continue to compensate their employees at the highest level, with practitioner salaries doubling and manager salaries nearly tripling from 2020 to 2021. The share of those earning more than $150,000 at high-evolution firms more than doubled to 20% in 2021 from 8% in 2020.

- Respondents working in financial services earned the highest salaries, followed by those working in healthcare and technology. There have been substantial increases across all sectors, with financial services nearly doubling from 16% in 2020 to 29% in 2021.


Puppet’s seventh annual DevOps Salary Report, which includes a more extensive look at the data, is available for download here.


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About Puppet
Puppet empowers people to innovate through infrastructure automation. For more than a dozen years, Puppet has pioneered the way in which infrastructure and operation teams scale infrastructure in the largest and fastest growing organisations in the world. More than 40,000 organisations — including more than 80 percent of the Global 5000 — have benefited from Puppet’s open source and commercial solutions to strengthen customers’ security posture, compliance standards and business resiliency beyond the data center to the cloud. Headquartered in Portland, Oregon, Puppet is a privately held company with offices in London, Belfast, Singapore, and Sydney. Learn more at puppet.com.

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