(I haven't read the rest of your post, but I think I can still answer this little snippet...)
> Why unavoidable? It's not that one is forced to use some tech... Even though the hyped crowd chants the names so loudly.
Peer pressure. Consultant-hiring-pressure, for example: Are you full-stack? "Full stack", now there's a phrase...
(EDIT: I honestly do feel that it's a sort of an attack by the sheer meta on the hiring side of the equation on the meta of the supply side of the equation. I don't imagine recruiters are doing much of this consciously, but it's definitely happening more and more...)
I think there is a difference between knowing the tech enough to list in in a resume, and actually using it.
I sort of know K8s. I have experimented with it, have set up a few smaller but nonetheless "real" clusters, I have ran various apps on them, have broken them with various sorts of fault conditions, have tried to repair them. Without this I wouldn't be able convince myself my opinion of K8s is even remotely close to being proper and informed one (okay, it is still not but it's closer), and not solely based on my preferences and beliefs. And this is also why I'm not using K8s in production anywhere I need to design, set up and manage a system that I should be generally able to reliably repair within hours (or faster).
To interviewers who just want to hear some important keywords, I can tell some tales how I ran that fancy mixed-arch amd64+armhf cluster for my CI. Most likely, omitting the fact that this was a personal project and that in the end I somehow broke it and despite spending a pair of evenings had failed to figure out what went wrong with the networking... so I've just scraped it and switched to Docker Swarm.
But if I'd to actually design a system that I would maintain, I'd go with whatever I believe is actually technically appropriate and not with a mauve SQL database[1]. And I believe I would be able to justify my choices, explain the trade-offs, requirements and so on. Unless it's on GKE or it's not my responsibility to manage the cluster - then I can go with K8s, no problem here - it wouldn't be a lie to say that I "know it and have some experience running apps on it, but have usually preferred other solutions". ;)
> I think there is a difference between knowing the tech enough to list in in a resume, and actually using it.
Of course, but the difference doesn't tend to come across on a recruiter's spreadsheet. Nowadays, I only go by
personal recommendations/references.
Just as an aside, and as an offer of XP: Tech A is largely irrelevant unless you have to execute in, say, 1 month. Success almost never depends on the tech -- it mostly depends on people.
> Success almost never depends on the tech -- it mostly depends on people.
Of course, that's true. But my understanding is, the technology choice is not about succeeding or failing - a good team with good plans can succeed with just about any tech that can somehow do the job. It's about costs. Complex but featureful tech may drive development costs down, but may also result in significantly higher maintenance costs.
"Yeah, he's a few PDF's shy of a full stack, I tell ya!"
side story:
Yeah, I went through 3 stages of hiring with $company. Interviews went great, and then I hear back that I didn't show up to the 3rd (much to my surprise). When the HR person checked back in, they said it was an error and instead they were no longer interested in me because I lacked Kubernetes experience specifically.
And my resume includes Openstack and Apache Mesos. Not Kuber. But they dragged me around. Still pisses me off that they couldn't read my resume. Then again, their interview process was... shall we say, "interesting".
> Yeah, I went through 3 stages of hiring with $company.
My BS radar goes off when I get asked for a 2nd interview, or any 4 hour group interview. Thanks, but no thanks. They did you a favor.
These interviewers are crazy, and have zero proof their convoluted process produces better hires than a single 30 minute coffee interview. They just don't want to admit they don't know what they are doing. As if the heavens will open up and god himself will shout down "He's the one!", if they just have enough rounds to get there.
I've also been interviewee recently in this space. I'm lucky in that in each one the interviewer showed a healthy scepticism or lower enthusiasm for K8s and similar products.
Maybe I'm doing my self a dis-service by not shooting for the moon. But I don't think so. I'd rather do real work than spend days reading upgrade notes. On-premises K8s time will come but for most that time is not now.
Perhaps. But I think it's better, that if they're willing to play those kinds of games that I wouldn't want to work for them anyways.
All tech companies run their own NIH stack in one way or another. If they aren't willing to admit that to themselves, there's not much I can do. It costs time to train to get new people up to speed... and given what kind of arduous journey learning OpenStack is, I figured they would have understood and went "Well you dont know K8N, but you're trainable in this stack.."
> Why unavoidable? It's not that one is forced to use some tech... Even though the hyped crowd chants the names so loudly.
Peer pressure. Consultant-hiring-pressure, for example: Are you full-stack? "Full stack", now there's a phrase...
(EDIT: I honestly do feel that it's a sort of an attack by the sheer meta on the hiring side of the equation on the meta of the supply side of the equation. I don't imagine recruiters are doing much of this consciously, but it's definitely happening more and more...)