‘True’ DevOps engineers in high demand, says Hays

Recruitment specialist Hays has released its latest quarterly report on the job market, identifying high demand for “true DevOps engineers,” “top level principal and technical leads,” front end and full stack developers and native iOS and Android developers.

Hays says demand for DevOps has been increasing as organisations move their infrastructure environment from localised storage to cloud based servers.

“When the communication between infrastructure, development and testing is aligned, the time required to produce clean high quality code is reduced, saving money and improving speed to market,” Hays says. “Key development practices are automation, continuous integration and test driven development.”

It says employers want candidates who are passionate about pure front-end development. “This is an area that has seen rapid change and continues to do so. Therefore, there is very much a need to keep abreast of trending and emerging technologies.”

It adds: “There is more emphasis placed on developers being technically agnostic across both front and back end. Given the substantial investment development requires, these professionals are desirable as they can assist in developing across the technical stack and save development costs.”

Traditional in-house Android developers are able to increase their annual earnings substantially at a number of large corporate and enterprise level organisations, according to Hays, and senior candidates moving into contract roles are creating opportunities for intermediate level developers to progress to the next stage in their career.

However, Hays says there is an increasing number of intermediate level candidates on the Auckland market with technical skills in the development space who are unable to find work. “This is a highly competitive area and employers have the luxury at present of being more selective. Employers in general tend to be unwilling to consider people without relevant soft skills to liaise with their senior peers, the business and third party vendors.”

Hays adds that many employers have refined their development recruitment process, now commonly asking candidates to complete a customised technical test prior to meeting with them to gauge their technical ability. “The depth of behavioural questioning is also more thorough to ensure candidates are a strong cultural fit for their organisation.”