Screaming in the Cloud - Episode 52: AWS as a Career Finding Clarity in the Ever-changing Job Market of the Cloud

Episode Date: March 20, 2019

The job market in the AWS world is complex and often confusing to both employers and employees. Wouldn’t it be great to have over 43,000 data points to draw a larger picture of the market and where you fall in line? Today, we are talking to Kate Powers who walks us through the AWS Salary Survey from Jefferson Frank and discusses some interesting insights as well as real world examples of the findings. Some of the highlights of the show include: The AWS job market at large Training Certificates: what’s their value How much value is in a job title Most desirable skills from employers Gender representation in the industry The discrepancy in compensation based on geography Links: https://www.jeffersonfrank.com https://www.jeffersonfrank.com/aws-salary-survey/ https://twitter.com/_JeffersonFrank https://www.linkedin.com/company/jefferson-frank/ https://www.facebook.com/JeffersonFrank.AWS .

Hello and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, cloud economist Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud. This week's episode of Screaming in the cloud. Maybe give some of that to us. DigitalOcean, from where I sit, biases for simplicity. I've spoken to a number of DigitalOcean customers, and they all say the same thing, which distills down to they can get up and running in less than a minute

and not have to spend weeks going to cloud school first. Making things simple and accessible has tremendous value in speeding up your time to market. There's also value in DigitalOcean offering things for a fixed price. You know what this month's bill is going to be. You're not going to have a minor heart issue when the bill comes due. And that winds up carrying forward in a number of different ways. Their services are understandable without spending three months of study first. You don't really have to go stupendously deep just to understand what you're getting into. It's click a button or make an API call and receive a cloud resource. They also offer very understandable monitoring and alerting.

They have a managed database offering. They have an object store. And as of late last year, they offer a managed Kubernetes offering that doesn't require a deep understanding of Greek mythology for you to wrap your head around it. For those wondering what I'm talking about, Kubernetes is of course named after the Greek god of spending money on cloud services. Lastly, DigitalOcean isn't what I would call small time. There are over 150,000 businesses using them today. Go ahead and give them a try or visit do.co slash screaming and they'll give you a free hundred dollar credit to try it out. That's do.co slash screaming.

Thanks again to DigitalOcean for their support of Screaming in the Cloud. Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. I'm joined this week by Kate Powers, principal consultant at Jefferson Frank. Welcome to the show, Kate. Hey, Corey Quinn. I'm joined this week by Kate Powers, Principal Consultant at Jefferson Frank. Welcome to the show, Kate. Hey, Corey, how's it going? Oh, can't complain too loudly because it'll overdrive the microphone. So let's start at the very beginning. What is a Jefferson Frank? Glad you asked. Jefferson Frank is the global leader in AWS recruitment. So we are a recruiting and consulting firm with global locations that specialize in placing AWS professionals.

We break up into a number of different categories of technology recruitment, but our whole entire goal is to increase the number of candidates, not only on the marketplace, but increase the number of jobs that we're able to bring to candidates. From a candidate and client perspective, our goal is to increase opportunity and just increase openness with available jobs on the marketplace around the world within the AWS ecosystem. Now we're 50 some odd episodes in, give or take. I don't have an exact count in front of

me and I don't always record in order. So I tend to give myself a little wiggle room on that. But people who've been listening to this show since the beginning may have noticed that in the past year, I've never had someone from a recruiting company on board. And the reason behind that is not what people would think. Oh, recruiters are all salespeople or recruiters are all of the devil or whatever, I guess, slur people want to hurl around. The honest truth of it is, is that I've been pretty upfront that my first job in tech was as a grumpy systems administrator

at a university. But what I don't often say is that I was 24 years old. Before that, I was a recruiter myself. And that job is incredibly hard. It tends to suffer from the poor reputation that some people bring into it. And I still is incredibly hard. It tends to suffer from the poor reputation that some people bring into it. And I still, many years later, get flashbacks whenever I have too long of a conversation around it. So it's been my own personal aversion, not a comment on the industry at large, just for clarity. Yeah, excellent. Well, look, I certainly hope that across this interview that I don't come across as the devil, I think, as a recruiter. Oh, yeah, we hear it all.

But it's been really fun to be part of a company that is able to have an impact on the marketplace. And I've enjoyed myself learning about AWS because it's such a huge area of growth across every industry in the world. So, yeah, I'm looking forward to diving into it a bit more. Sounds good. As to whether your company is the devil or not, I will leave that to the terrifying randos of Twitter to judge. So let's start at the beginning. A very recurring theme of this podcast has been on bringing the next generation in. Where does it come from? How do you wind up building a world where the existing senior generation walked a path that is now closed?

There are more jobs than there are people to fill them, particularly at senior levels. Where does the next generation come from? And to some extent, that area is one of the best places where recruiting firms tend to add value. It's easy to be dismissive when you can step back and say, oh, I've been working on this for 20 years and my network is broad and vast and I know all the hiring managers at all the companies I might want to work at. There's an incredible amount of privilege baked into that. And early on in your career, you have approximately none of it. I've

been fairly open about my own travails in that particular area. So what I find fascinating is how you wind up viewing that space. Where does the next generation come from? Well, I'm glad you bring that up. It's a real struggle for everyone out there, for, like you mentioned, companies that need to hire when there's such an incredibly large skills gap in the marketplace for AWS professionals. And it's a real challenge, frankly, from the recruitment perspective as well, because we are always on the lookout for mid to senior level professionals, typically. That being said, what I would comment on from bringing people up and helping to increase

the number of people out there who have access to AWS positions, trying to help that next generation grow. I personally, and we really do try and instill this across the business, but it's all about information sharing. It's all about getting more jobs out there for more people. It's all about having conversations with companies and learning what their long-term needs are, trying to identify how maybe a more junior candidate might be able to fill those needs. From the salary survey perspective, it's full of data points, over 43,000 data points, not just around candidates' salaries and benefits all over the world, but also on what companies and candidates are looking for in their next job. So for me and the Jefferson Frank perspective,

I really do think it's just about trying to spread information to answer your question about where this next generation comes from. I mean, it starts today. It starts with training. It starts with certifications. It starts with going out to learn as much as you possibly can. But you do, I agree, have to be given that opportunity to work professionally with AWS before you really can grasp it. So to bring it back to a point, it's a constant conversation that we're hoping to have with candidates and clients across

the marketplace to help to contribute to minimizing that gap wherever possible. You mentioned your salary survey, and we will absolutely get to that in a minute. But before we do, I want to call out something that I tend to be a little bit biased on historically, just from my own perspective. Not too long ago, I was fairly dismissive of certifications in almost any space because my position on it was, I'd rather see experience of having done things that are provable on a resume rather than taking tests that at best, I guess, shadow what winds up happening in the production environment. The problem is that that path isn't the right answer for everyone. I sit here and talk about how certifications aren't right for me, well, no kidding.

If I'm going for an engineering job in the AWS space, the story of why someone should hire me has less to do with the fact that I have a certification or don't and more to do with the, yeah, I have a podcast about this stuff. I write a snarky newsletter in this space and I have a 15-year history on my resume

showing how this works out. I think that's a common failure mode and it have a 15-year history on my resume showing how this works out. I think that's a common failure mode, and it is a failure mode. The blanket dismissal of certifications as a viable way of showing expertise in an area is something that I'm seeing as an increasingly toxic element in engineering culture, and I'm not quite sure what to do about that. But I want to call that out from my own perspective, as well as potentially spark people to start seeing that potentially in how they view the world. Yeah, absolutely. It's really interesting because that exact argument against why a certification isn't exactly experience and how a certification can't showcase your skills, it is toxic. And I think so many people are looking for an outlet to

not only learn, but to show that they're trying to learn because the competition is so tough. If you're looking at a resume for somebody that has six months of professional AWS experience, actually, if you're looking at two resumes of candidates who each have that same amount of experience just at a time frame standpoint, but one of those professionals holds three AWS certifications or three other certifications, from a hiring perspective, you're probably going to go with the one who's showing more interest in their own professional development. And it's tough because I think that does need to be respected. I will say, however, that I also think that there's other ways to showcase your own interest in professional development. And that could be through classes that you enroll in.

A lot of colleges around the country are offering coursework specifically for cloud studies or some of these awesome third-party tools out there, that's a great way to increase your knowledge of the cloud and your ability to contribute to projects. It's also, you can take classes online, certainly another option. So I think certifications are a piece of the puzzle, but I think that a GitHub account that you use to kind of fiddle around and create your own projects is also, these are all different ways to show how you're applying your knowledge and you're hoping to better yourself out there in a field that really is so competitive right now. I agree with what you're saying. The challenge,

of course, is that also starts to turn into almost a self-selection bias for people with the spare time and lack of family commitments to spend nights and weekends working on this stuff. It's a hard problem to solve, and I certainly don't have a global answer for this. This stuff is always nuanced, and the easiest thing to do with any proposed way of analyzing this easily is to tear down whatever someone proposes. It's a hard problem. I don't think that there's a great answer. I agree with you. And if any of the listeners do end up coming up with an answer, please let us know. Okay. So there are a number of different recruiting companies in this space. It turns out that whenever there's a shortage of qualified candidates, there's a number of

companies that step up and start trying to solve that in various ways. The reason that I'm talking with you from Jefferson Frank is that late last year, you released something that I found really creative, specifically the 2018-19 AWS Salary Survey. So let's start at the beginning. What is that? I'm glad you asked. So AWS Salary Survey for Jefferson Frank is a collection of data points from around the world on benefits, salaries, diversity initiatives, a whole range of topics that fall within the AWS community. And what we've done historically is create a salary survey for a number of different brands that are a part of our larger parent organization called the Frank Recruitment Group.

And they've been really successful in just, as I mentioned earlier, sharing that information with the marketplace and trying to increase awareness of the competitive nature of hiring and finding jobs. Now, this salary survey itself is special because everything in it has to do with AWS professionals. It's five different categories of roles that you could fall into, which I do hesitate to categorize what someone's doing in their job.

But we look at data points around specifically DevOps engineering, big data and BI, IaaS, PaaS, security. We're trying to analyze all of these different categories of AWS technology so that we can provide some information to people more specific to their skillset. Let's also caveat this with the fact that we're here today to interpret the data, not to judge it, not to defend it, not to bring it up or tear it down, but rather just to discuss what was said in the responses to your survey. This should not be construed as blaming or defending anything that's uncovered in that survey. In other words, don't at me. Let's start beginning and walk through the survey a little bit. There's an awful lot of job titles that are listed under the section toward the beginning of typical roles we recruit for. AWS Cloud Architect, AWS Enterprise Architect, AWS Cloud Administrator, AWS DevOps Engineer.

And if you were to, and there are several more that are exactly like that, but in the interest of time, I'm not going to read them all. At some point, do you, like I step back and I think that there's, these are distinctions without meaning past a certain point. Where the basic skill set behind most of these roles develops into effectively the same type of profile. And what you call it is almost interchangeable. Look, I don't know, Corey, if I would necessarily want to change your mind right away, because I do agree with you with the fact that at a basic level, a lot of these job titles we include in our salary survey share a common thread of skills, tools, languages, et cetera. languages etc but what i would challenge you and listeners to acknowledge is that with such a wide scope of technology available within aws with all of the services over 100 services and countless

third-party tools that can be integrated you have to get more specific somewhere there is a difference between somebody who's you's sitting behind a computer and contributing to really complex code on a day-to-day basis and somebody who steps away from that from time to time to contribute to conversations around architectural design and budgeting and planning from a project perspective. So what we've tried to do with the titles in the salary survey is create more of a streamlined approach to recruiting that just becomes a bit more niche, if that makes sense.

It absolutely does. And something that I experienced that was revelatory for me a few years back was at an Austin DevOps Days. They threw a talk pay event, which wound up being in one of the open spaces. People would put their job title and their salary on a board anonymously. And it became pretty clear that this was in the earlier days and was more contentious. But if you had the word DevOps in your job title, something that a number of people argue should absolutely never be there, it wound up equating to roughly a 30% pay increase over people who didn't have it there. So on the one hand, I agree. DevOps is about a culture. It's about a movement. It's not a job title. On the other, fighting that battle doesn't seem

productive. And to some extent, it turns into an argument against paying you more, which has never been a story I've been particularly interested in telling. So as much as I want to pick nits over this one, I agree. That's what people are asking for. Smile, nod, slap, whatever the ridiculous title of the week is on your resume and keep going. I think that that is a more pragmatic approach than driving for ideological theory. I fully agree. Pragmatic is the key word there. It's not necessarily perfect. And we could probably record, or you could probably record, a number of sessions on this podcast just about DevOps. And should it be a word? Should it be a concept? What's the story behind DevOps? So we don't need to go too much into that now. I think

everybody's more or less aware of the connotations of what a DevOps engineer is or does or how that word affects the marketplace and perception. But I agree. I mean, it is super interesting. Just the other day, I was recruiting for a DevOps position in the Boston area. And the company that was seeking to hire this individual was very particular around the title of the role remaining at systems engineer. That's the approved title. That's what we're sticking to. And I, my conversation with them involved kind of a questioning around the decision behind that. I was like, to be honest with you, I know exactly what that skillset needs to be, and that's perfectly fine. But the people you're

going to go out and interview for this role, the people that will hopefully connect you with, want the title DevOps engineer because of how attractive it is on the marketplace. And if it's, if they're doing the exact same thing as they would be in a systems engineer title, then you might want to consider offering that just because of the value that people see. So I don't know. It's one of those things where if people think it's valuable, it becomes valuable. Absolutely. And I'm not particularly concerned with what it says in an org chart as much as I am what it says on my business cards and, let's be honest, what it will say someday on my LinkedIn profile.

Sure. That's totally fair. Hey, and LinkedIn is a huge portal for connecting with people within a certain industry. And if you've got DevOps in your title, you're probably going to show up a lot faster than somebody who doesn't. So let's talk a little bit about methodology. You had a large number of respondents. Where did you find them? Yeah, so the total number of respondents was over 43,000, which I think I mentioned, and that was from internal placement data. So actual customers and candidates that we've worked with, that we've helped to find and secure a new position,

as well as jobs that were registered across the organization throughout 2018. So even if we didn't end up filling a position with a company, we were still in conversations and took data points from what we put into that job search. So primarily, that's where we're getting our information. But of course, that number is going to increase dramatically as we look to release a second edition of the Jefferson Frank salary survey later this year, because hopefully the data points will have grown and the customers that we continue to expand and do business with will expand. So to answer your question, that's where the data itself is coming from. Certainly happy as well to elaborate on some of the additional data points we found as we go through the conversation.

Oh, absolutely. It's interesting in that as I flip through this, what people are hiring for, 89% of respondents identify EC2 as part of the core skill set, which is just fascinating to me. From my own work, I know that EC2 is roughly 60% of global spend on AWS. There are exceptions in either direction on an account specific basis, obviously, but all roads still lead to running big virtual machines in the cloud, more or less. Yeah, it's really interesting. And to go back to that part of our conversation where we were discussing how we can bridge the gap and how we can help to promote the next generation of AWS professionals, you know, EC2 is the first service that so many candidates we speak to feel comfortable with and really master in the first few months of their studies or their, you know, kind of professional careers. So yeah, I think that that is definitely deserving of that spot, that response in the survey itself.

And some of the other leading products that we saw are, here I've got EC2 autoscaling, EBS, S3, CloudWatch. And then, you know, the list goes on from there, but I think you're absolutely right. It certainly all comes back to building those virtual machines, no matter what industry you're in, no matter what size the project is. I'll take it a step further and say that one of the benefits slash pain points of EC2 is that by getting comfortable with that service, you're almost definitionally picking up things along the way about auto-scaling, about the Elastic Block Store, their disk service, about how networking works. So VPCs become a concern. You're talking about IAM permissions. You're potentially looking at KMS, depending on what you're doing. Odds are you'll have something

that lives in S3. It's one of those services that by the time you're comfortable with it, you pick up roughly a dozen services that touch it along the way. EC2 is vast and deep, but a lot of the services that feed into it are significantly less so, to the point where, oh, I actually know 20 different services in AWS now, all based on that one project I did, which was getting a web server up and running because I make terrible life choices. Great. It seems daunting to look at this giant list of things that people care about, but some of them are very almost trivial and straightforward. AWS Certificate Manager, for example, 30% of respondents say is

relevant to what they do, but that's the sort of thing that you can pick up in about an hour as far as how it winds up interacting with other things you've got. Other stuff takes a lifetime to master, and I'm not saying under the hood these services aren't complex, but what you need to be conversant with to work with things is a smaller surface area than many people might expect. I completely agree. And even from the employer perspective, it can be tough to know that, right? If you are an individual who's in a hiring management position and you're looking to bring on someone with these skills, you might look at a list that's been drawn up or you might create a list of services that you want to stick on a JD. And

in reality, the candidate might not need to know every single one of those because exactly like you just brought to light, EC2 or a couple of core services are the bulk of what you're doing and the other pieces of the puzzle take no time at all to learn. So it's an interesting conversation to have from that perspective and just explain, you know, yep, we know that this individual doesn't necessarily have all these services down, but we're here to make the argument in favor of their candidacy because we know how, how, I was going to say insignificant. That's probably a much more negative word than I'm looking for, but we know how trivial or easy to learn some of

these other services are. So I do agree with you. One thing that attracted my notice as to why I focused on this survey more than I might other things is that you list, there's a page in here devoted to education and technical skills. First, as a throwaway, you've got 85% of professionals who responded hold at least a degree or equivalent. Well, I don't. But 62% said that they didn't feel it was an important factor when finding a role working with AWS, which I also agree with. More to the point, you give a list of six online resources. And what's fascinating to me is that two of them are things I run, this podcast and my last week in AWS newsletter. Everything else in there is more or less either an aggregator

or an AWS property. You also mentioned A Cloud Guru, for which I do the release review segment. So it seems like I'm slowly taking over the world of online resources. I would question the validity of these results, except I didn't promote this survey through any of my newsletter issues, any of my podcast episodes. This came out of the blue for me and was sort of a surprise and triggered sort of a dawning realization of, holy crap, people are listening to things I say followed very closely by, holy crap,

I've got to put more thought into what I say. And that leads us to a point of, huh, maybe I should watch my mouth more. Well, look, I I'm so grateful to be included in this podcast. It's,

it's really a cool experience for me and for the company as well. But I think to your point, there's two items, right? So the first is we want to provide a salary survey that gives resources to candidates and customers looking to increase their productivity, their knowledge, all that good stuff. Two, we chose those specific resources because we heard them from our candidates. We didn't learn about them by going to Google and typing in best cloud trainings website. We learned about, for example, A Cloud Guru because so many of the candidates that we talk to day in and day out reference A Cloud Guru as a great training site. So I think it's really

important to be transparent about that as well and where that information comes from so that we can keep ourselves in the company of other successful businesses that are impacting the marketplace. One other area that I find a little, I don't want to say disagreeable because I'm not sure that that winds up going far enough, is there's an entire page devoted to diversity. And one comment on here is that 70% of respondents felt that there's a fair gender representation at work. Now, I'm not going to come out and say there's no way that's true. It's possible that I'm working with the wrong companies. It's possible I'm speaking at the wrong conferences, looking out at the audiences. It's possible that people who

email me, reach out on Twitter, et cetera, et cetera, all just magically happen to buy us to an awful lot of dudes who look an awful lot like I do. But I'm skeptical. And I'm not saying that people are notably lying, but I do question the perception versus the reality. There have been rigorous studies that show that there is a very real gender equality problem in this space. And I'm curious as to what your thoughts are on that. Yeah, I'm really glad you bring this up because it's a cause that's very near and dear to my own heart. You know, I may not work with technology every single day hands on, but I certainly, I'm certainly a woman and I'm trying to help him increase the gap there as well and increase diversity initiatives for people like my sister who is studying engineering.

So this number, this 70%, I was surprised by it too, Corey. I think that we have to look at where we got our data from, right? We got our data from customers that we work with. And a lot of times we're helping to push those diversity initiatives. Second piece is we are really trying to, I suppose, from a salary perspective, you do have to get people to respond to a salary in order to build it, right? And people are going to be more likely, in my opinion, to respond to a salary and participate in these types of initiatives who are already kind of in that mindset of, yeah, we're hiring women, we're promoting diversity, we're promoting education. So that's not really based on any facts, any statistics that I have in front of me.

That's just kind of my gut reaction to your question. But I would say there is not enough being done anywhere in the US, I don't know anywhere in the world, to the standards that needs to be held to, to get women involved in engineering. There's so much that can be done. There's so much potential. And I'm happy that companies like Jefferson Frank and companies like some of the businesses we partner with are spearheading efforts and are involved in the Women in Tech Conference.

But that 70%, I don't think that's a fair representation of the marketplace by any stretch. Yeah, there's a whole separate conversation as well to be had, not just around gender divide, but around ethnicity, racial background, et cetera. And I don't think that that's a conversation either one of us is really equipped to have at the moment. It's clear that there's a serious problem in this space. And I certainly don't have any answers to that. I just don't want listeners to think that I'm somehow hand-waving it away. Well, we had a 30-second conversation about it that was sort of uncomfortable there. We solved the problem. We haven't. And this is an ongoing issue, and we will be returning to this in many episodes yet to come. It's a nuanced and delicate area, but it's also a giant problem. And I think

that there needs to be a lot more work done in that space. Moving on to something a little less controversial, let's make fun of people in foreign countries. Specifically, when you wind up doing salary reports, you break them down by regions. Specifically, you're targeting, for example, your breakdowns are United States, United Kingdom, France, and Germany. Awesome. The challenge with this is there's a few challenges in here, but let's start with the obvious one. I give a conference talk from time to time on salary negotiation for human beings with Sonia Gupta, who is fantastic at the negotiation piece. She's a former attorney, and I keep trying to get her on this show. We'll see what happens and how persuasive I can be. But if I get on a plane from where I live in San Francisco and I go travel to Duluth and give a

talk there about fair compensation, people look at me like I've lost my mind because it turns out there's a bit of a disparity in the going rate for an engineer between downtown San Francisco and somewhere fairly rural. Sorry, Duluth, not to pick on you, but Duluth. Yeah, it's really interesting. And unfortunately, for this edition, Duluth, not to pick on you, but Duluth. Yeah, it's really interesting. And unfortunately, for this edition, for today, for what we're talking about and the purposes of the salary survey, the results that we drew aren't going to get more specific to region. And it's so interesting because somebody, what someone is earning in San Francisco versus what someone might be earning in Duluth. It's such a huge gap. And how I approach this topic or this conversation and try to be fair to job

seekers around the US is, the first thing I bring up is we're working with cloud technologies. So most of the time, the work that you're doing can be done remotely. So if a company is hiring and they have a history of hiring remote employees, it evens the playing field a bit. And so the data points we're collecting can come from everywhere because you might work for a business that's based in San Francisco, but you live somewhere in a lower cost of living area. Now, the complicated conversation to have is it just is down to individual business and what a company structure is like and how many people are working remotely. Is that even a

possibility? You brought it up yourself earlier when we were speaking prior to the podcast, a company like Slack, who promotes communication from a remote standpoint, their employees typically work on site. So I have a challenge answering this question or speaking too specifically to the topic because each of the companies take it on a case-by-case basis. Now, for the purpose of the survey itself, yeah, the results that you guys are reading are not going to be the same across every area of the United States, even though we're using the data across the United States. Does that make sense? Or can I clarify? No, it absolutely does. And you're alluding to a previous recording I had with Holly Allen, one of the engineering managers at Slack. And her point on this, which I tend to agree with,

is that remote culture is hard. And it definitely opens opportunities if you can hire people wherever they happen to be. But unless you start a company with a distributed culture from the beginning, it's very easy to fall into a pattern where the person who is remote as the first remote hire is effectively a second-class citizen at best, where they're not there for the hallway conversations. They're not there to go grab a team coffee where a lot of the real bonding and decision-making can get done. When I was managing a team with one person who was remote, that happened regardless of what we tried to do to counter that. In hindsight, I would not have built that team with a remote member just

based upon how unfair it was to that person. So I think that slapping a, we'll hire a remote person for this team and see how it works, because it'll also save us some money along the way, because we don't have to hire someone in downtown San Francisco, has the potential to be profoundly unfair to the person you wind up picking. So if you're talking to a company about being the first remote hire, I get it. It could be compelling, but tread carefully that that can end up not working out the way you might want it to. Completely agree. And my advice to any job seeker would be to ask those questions and to better understand what the setup is currently like at a company that you're considering working for. Because you might end up taking the job and really enjoying the technology.

But a couple of months down the road, the remote aspect might to draw those conflicts, you know. And if it's not going to be a business that you stay at for a long time, then you just want to know those things up front so that you can make the decision on the long term. One other area that I wanted to highlight, because I did in fact promise that we would make fun of people in other countries, is if I take a look through the reported salaries, let's pick as an easy example here, cloud engineer. That sounds generic enough to be something we can argue about. In the United States, you have a junior range of 95,000 and a high range of 130,000. Cool. That provides us a baseline. In the United Kingdom, and understand this is in pounds, it's 32,500 pounds with a high end of 50,000 pounds with a conversion rate that is approximately half. And you'll see similar things manifesting in itself as well between France and Germany. And speaking as someone who lives in the United States, I'm

freely aware that our employer protections and labor laws are, let's not kid ourselves here, barbaric. There are effectively no protections. You can be fired in 49 out of 50 states for any reason or no reason except based upon membership in a protected class, which means you can be fired for wearing a red shirt or not wearing a red shirt on any given day. That is not the case in those other countries. So there's a security there. There's also a political issue I don't want to get into about benefits that wind up being much more comprehensive

than we see in the United States. And there's tremendous value there. But is that a 50 to 65% pay difference worth of benefits? I have a hard time making that case. So I'm curious as far as, first, if you're seeing these trends emerge in your conversations with people, and secondly, what you make of it. Yeah, I appreciate you bringing this up. It's really shocking to just look at side by side. And as someone who mainly focuses on the U.S. territory and U.S. hiring, I had to do a bit of research myself and chat with some of my colleagues who work out of London to just get their two cents on the issue. Because what I initially thought is, well, maybe the skills gap is just lower in the UK. And I think to an extent that the skills gap, while it still exists in the UK, is potentially just smaller than it is in the US. It's extremely significant here. But there's so many other factors to consider that I can't be too sure. I think that just as you've mentioned, a couple of things to consider are notice periods,

HR practices, employee-employ employer protection rights, and just how these different things compare from country to country. But it truly is astonishing just looking at the numbers side by side. I can speak to one specific example where I had a business I was working with that was headquartered in the UK, but was hiring for an office here in the US. And it was the expansion of a new team, really great opportunity. But their concept of, or their, I guess, prediction of what an average salary would be for someone in the US was miles off the mark. And it was just, it was so interesting because the protection that they had for employees, the guaranteed healthcare coverage, the benefits,

the PTO, which here in the US is actually seen as a self-standing benefit. And I think in the UK, it's more of an entitlement. Those were all part of our conversation. It's like, well, yeah, we're in a new market now. And these things just simply aren't the same. So there, you know, again, not to give you a wishy washy noncomm to friends of mine abroad who have taken similar roles to what's going on here. And it's almost a incomprehensible gulf in some cases where the same or equivalent skill sets is compensated radically differently in both places. I don't have an answer for this and I don't pretend that

there's going to be any easy answers here. But it's an interesting conversation. And I think that it's something that might be worth focusing on in future versions of this particular study. Absolutely. And, you know, to bring us full circle here, I really do think that the main argument to be made is all comes back to the skills gap, and how we can increase, or rather, excuse me, decrease the skills gap for AWS professionals, not just locally, but all over the world. And there's a lot of really wonderful companies and initiatives taking place to help educate and increase the availability of talented professionals.

So I really think that it does all come down to that. And I think that's probably a good place to leave that. So if people want to engage with you folks more, where can they find you? Yeah, you can find us. You can come visit me in New York. But no, we've got a lot of different data points that we can share a lot of ways to get engaged. The first I would direct people at just downloading our salary survey. It's available online. We will throw a link to that in the show notes.

Perfect for the very low cost of your name and email address. You can get access to our salary survey just to cover a range of topics that we've discussed here in the podcast, as well as some additional areas that might be of interest. But in all reality, we're everywhere. We post on job sites. We partner with a number of different organizations

just to get access to training out to candidates. You can reach us all over LinkedIn, Jefferson, Frank, anyone who works at the business in our five offices in the US will be able to provide some insight or additional commentary around the findings of the salary survey. Sounds good.S. will be able to provide some insight or additional commentary around the findings of the salary survey. Sounds good. Awesome. Kate, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me today. I appreciate it. Yeah, it's been fun, Corey. Thank you so much for having me. Kate Powers, Principal Consultant at Jefferson Frank. I'm Corey Quinn,

and this is Screaming in the Cloud. This has been this week's episode of Screaming in the Cloud. You can also find more Corey at ScreamingInTheCloud.com or wherever Fine Snark is sold.