Chapter 4. Economic Trends Relating to the SRE Profession
For a profession that has only been a named role for about 15 years, SRE has
grown into a significant force. Two SREs have even ended up on the cover of Time
magazine.1
Looking across a number of job posting sites,
there are thousands of open positions around the world. Table 4-1 gives an idea of the numbers on some popular sites as of January 2019.
Table 4-1. SRE job listings, January 2019
Site
Number of listings
Indeed
5,985
Glassdoor
11,097
LinkedIn
2,032
Stack Overflow
1,384
Monster
2,289
Of course, some of the same job listings probably show up on more than one of those
boards, but SRE is listed as one of the top 20 “Most Promising Jobs” in LinkedIn’s
annual reports for 2017,
2018, and
2019.
The role has seen significant increases in the number of job openings as well as
median salary across the span of those three reports (base salary increased from $140k in 2017 to $200k in 2019).
Another perspective on the growth of the profession can be seen in Figure 4-1,
which shows the
attendance numbers for the USENIX SREcon
conference series that began in
2014.
Figure 4-1. Attendance at SREcon conferences
Lex Neva’s newsletter SRE Weekly,
which covers blog posts and other online articles of interest to the profession,
has seen similar growth from its beginning in 2016 (Figure 4-2).
Figure 4-2. SRE Weekly ...
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