This is not too surprising. Candidates want to join companies that are perceived to be hip and with it technology-wise in order to further their own resume.
Personally, you don't have to be hip, but I want to be able to have another job in hand based on the tech I was working with and the work I was working on in a matter of days when I decide to bounce (or the decision is made for me). This is just good risk and career management.
(disclosure: infra roles previously)
You left out "Their bespoke infra work tends to be the genesis of the commodity infrastructure other people are using."
It's not hard for a Googler familiar with Borg to pick up Kubernetes. It's not hard for a Facebooker with some UI work under their belt to figure out React.
If a company says they don't use any modern JS framework and stick to JQuery, I'd be out before they even explain why. Not because I want to be hip and further my own resume but because I'd hate my job if I worked there.
I would walk away if they were using a technology not fit for the job, or were actively building an in-house version based on out-dated knowledge (the use of the word "minion" in Kubernetes was deprecated in 2014 IIRC).
Think about this in another realm, like plumbing. If you were a plumber, would you accept a plumbing job if the company told you that they didn't buy materials and tools, and were instead designing and building their own in-house version?
If they decided in 2014 not to use k8s, how much effort do you expect them to spend on keeping up-to-date with the latest and greatest of a technology that they're not using?
This is another way of saying that they don't want to read too much documentation.
p.s. Not claiming it was the right tool for the job in this case, it would all depend on context.
So maybe if people hear, hey our infrastructure is running on some 10 year old Frankenstein cobbled together from Docker and Virtual Machines and AWS and on premise servers they just pass.
I’m tired of having to learn an new infrastructure management/deployment tool every time I shift jobs. Tired of having to work with company custom platform. If you’re deployed on kubernetes it would take me a day to figure out how/where everything is deployed just by poking around with kubectl. Probably around that much time to deploy new software too.
K8s is just another giant footgun. Good and bad orgs will still be good or bad, with or without it, but it definitely amplifies the bad.
If we’re looking at the median, most orgs will more or less work with k8s manifests, maybe with some abstraction layer on top to make it easier for developers.