DevOps Engineer vs IT Support Specialist
Measured from each occupation's own live postings: mostly different jobs wearing similar names. Posted pay favors the devops engineer by about $16k at the midpoint. Salary bands, both switching directions, and the shared skills below, every number from live postings, refreshed nightly.
DevOps Engineer
600 open roles · devops engineer salary · careers for devops engineers
IT Support Specialist
600 open roles · it support specialist salary · careers for it support specialists
The overlap, measured
Skills that appear in both occupations’ posting demand. This is the shared core; everything else on each side is the difference.
Switching, both directions
The asymmetry is the finding: devops engineer → it support specialist reads 35% ready; the reverse only 18%. Skill overlap is not symmetric, and the direction you travel matters.
DevOps Engineer → IT Support Specialist
Transition estimate: 12–24 mo.
The gap, from it support specialist postings: Customer Service, Presentation, SaaS, Technical Writing.
IT Support Specialist → DevOps Engineer
Transition estimate: 12–24 mo.
The gap, from devops engineer postings: Site Reliability Engineering, CI/CD, Terraform, Kubernetes.
Related comparisons
- DevOps Engineer vs Systems Administrator62% peak overlap
- IT Support Specialist vs Network Engineer54% peak overlap
- DevOps Engineer vs Solutions Architect51% peak overlap
- DevOps Engineer vs Network Engineer51% peak overlap
- Backend Developer vs DevOps Engineer45% peak overlap
- DevOps Engineer vs Software Engineer43% peak overlap
Which one do your skills favor?
Run the instrument with your own skill set and both readiness numbers recompute for you. Free, no account.
Quick answers
Which pays more, devops engineer or it support specialist?
DevOps Engineer, by about $16k a year at the midpoint. Going by postings that state pay, the posted middle band for a devops engineer runs $68k–$141k, and for an it support specialist it runs $50k–$126k. We only count postings that state a salary, so these are advertised figures rather than estimates.
Are devops engineer and it support specialist the same job?
No. Despite the similar names, their postings ask for mostly different skills. The skills both sets of postings want are Cybersecurity, Linux, SQL, Azure, Networking.
Can a devops engineer become an it support specialist?
Yes, and a typical devops engineer profile already covers 35% of what it support specialist postings ask for. Our estimate for the transition is 12–24 mo. The route page lists the exact skills that make up the gap.
Can an it support specialist become a devops engineer?
In this direction a typical it support specialist profile covers 18% of what devops engineer postings ask for. Our estimate for the transition is 12–24 mo. It is worth noticing that the two directions are not symmetric: devops engineer to it support specialist is the easier move (35% against 18%).
Method: each occupation’s salary band is the posted 25th–75th percentile from its own corpus; readiness is coverage of the destination’s posting-skill weight; shared skills are read from the overlap waterfall. Pairs sharing too few skills are not scored in that direction. Refreshed with the nightly scrape.