The Roles, Responsibilities, and Skills of Engineers in the Era of Microservices-Based Architectures

Enterprises often try to tame the complexity of their software using microservices and practitioners generally perceive the impact of microservices as positive. However, different responsibilities fall in the hands of practitioners and new skill-sets are required to address the challenges and reap the benefits of microservices. The objective of this study is to gather and organize what industry requires from microservices practitioners. To achieve this, we conduct a qualitative analysis of 125 job-ads related to microservices that are gathered from 7 different countries, across 5 continents, posted during 14 consecutive days, sampled from a total of 1351 job-ads. We contribute with detailed taxonomies on roles, responsibilities, soft- and hard-skills that are necessary for microservices practitioners. Specifically, we detail 5 families of responsibilities, 3 of which are human-centered, describe 8 themes of popular soft-skills and describe 11 themes of popular hard-skills, along with how they relate to soft-skills. Our results indicate the importance of human-centered responsibilities and skills in microservices practitioners, and point to the existence of a job market for microservices software architects with a high demand on human aspects. Hence, our findings can help unravel organizational structures in microservices, improve training programmes, and understand the manifestation of human aspects in microservices.