What Is SRE?

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 subscriber growth

While SRE can help for every online service, the growing adoption of cloud-based “always on” technologies and teams distributed around the globe serve to highlight the need for reliability even for traditionally hard-to-use internal IT tools. Engineers who can build for and support reliability will be in ever-increasing demand.

¹ Mikey Dickerson in 2014, and Susan Fowler in 2017.