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And a Product Designer is $5k less still. It's not a question of "valuing" employees, it's about what salary you need to offer to be able to hire and retain pe

And a Product Designer is $5k less still. It's not a question of "valuing" employees, it's about what salary you need to offer to be able to hire and retain people at the required skill level. And good SREs are apparently willing to (or plentiful enough to need to) accept slightly less money than equally good developers. That said, the phenomenon extends well beyond our industry. It's common in all industries that the people who design (as in architecture, not graphic design) and build the product make better salaries than the people who operate the infrastructure, however critically important their role is. > This is especially vexing in light of the fact I've never met a highly qualified Ops person who wasn't also a skilled developer Be careful to compare like for like. A highly qualified ops person compares to a highly qualified developer, not merely a "skilled" one. For all the difficulty of objectively measuring skill, I would assume that a highly qualified ops person would make substantially more than a merely skilled developer.

xigency 10y ago
Yes, I think the subtle distinction between highly-qualified and skilled is what matters here. $10k is the difference between several years of experience. To switch from SRE to developer, you would have to be willing to give up a few of those years.
tristor 10y ago
> Be careful to compare like for like. A highly qualified ops person compares to a highly qualified developer, not merely a "skilled" one. For all the difficulty of objectively measuring skill, I would assume that a highly qualified ops person would make substantially more than a merely skilled developer. I think that I failed to communicate my meaning clearly in that statement, so I will attempt to clarify. What I mean is, that in my experience a highly qualified Ops person will /also/ be a skilled developer, but a highly qualified Developer will /not/ be a skilled Ops person. E.g. based on skill-set alone, highly qualified Ops people bring more skill to the table in union than a highly qualified Developer. Whether that's the skills you value or prioritize as an organization or not is another question entirely. For the purposes of my salary comparison above I used the same years of experience and skill rating in the calculator for the Site Reliability Engineer and Developer roles. As you say, I would expect a highly qualified Ops person to make more than a "merely skilled" developer. I wasn't really trying to state anything opposite of this.
- toomuchtodo 10y ago
  > that in my experience a highly qualified Ops person will /also/ be a skilled developer, but a highly qualified Developer will /not/ be a skilled Ops person. I have ~15 years of ops experience, and I'm not a skilled developer. I bill ~$200/hr for infrastructure/AWS architecture/DevOps consulting (when not at devops day job), with limited need to be proficient at software development.
  - nasalgoat 10y ago
    Curious where you're getting that hourly without also doing coding. I'm a terrible programmer but I have 20 years of massive scale op experience.
    - toomuchtodo 10y ago
      > Curious where you're getting that hourly without also doing coding. Both startups and enterprises. > Henry Ford once balked at paying $10,000 to General Electric for work done troubleshooting a generator, and asked for an itemized bill. The engineer who performed the work, Charles Steinmetz, sent this: "Making chalk mark on generator, $1. Knowing where to make mark, $9,999." Ford paid the bill.

xigency 10y ago

Yes, I think the subtle distinction between highly-qualified and skilled is what matters here. $10k is the difference between several years of experience. To switch from SRE to developer, you would have to be willing to give up a few of those years.

tristor 10y ago

> Be careful to compare like for like. A highly qualified ops person compares to a highly qualified developer, not merely a "skilled" one. For all the difficulty of objectively measuring skill, I would assume that a highly qualified ops person would make substantially more than a merely skilled developer. I think that I failed to communicate my meaning clearly in that statement, so I will attempt to clarify. What I mean is, that in my experience a highly qualified Ops person will /also/ be a skilled developer, but a highly qualified Developer will /not/ be a skilled Ops person. E.g. based on skill-set alone, highly qualified Ops people bring more skill to the table in union than a highly qualified Developer. Whether that's the skills you value or prioritize as an organization or not is another question entirely. For the purposes of my salary comparison above I used the same years of experience and skill rating in the calculator for the Site Reliability Engineer and Developer roles. As you say, I would expect a highly qualified Ops person to make more than a "merely skilled" developer. I wasn't really trying to state anything opposite of this.

toomuchtodo 10y ago
> that in my experience a highly qualified Ops person will /also/ be a skilled developer, but a highly qualified Developer will /not/ be a skilled Ops person. I have ~15 years of ops experience, and I'm not a skilled developer. I bill ~$200/hr for infrastructure/AWS architecture/DevOps consulting (when not at devops day job), with limited need to be proficient at software development.
- nasalgoat 10y ago
  Curious where you're getting that hourly without also doing coding. I'm a terrible programmer but I have 20 years of massive scale op experience.
  - toomuchtodo 10y ago
    > Curious where you're getting that hourly without also doing coding. Both startups and enterprises. > Henry Ford once balked at paying $10,000 to General Electric for work done troubleshooting a generator, and asked for an itemized bill. The engineer who performed the work, Charles Steinmetz, sent this: "Making chalk mark on generator, $1. Knowing where to make mark, $9,999." Ford paid the bill.