Published on 15 June 2026

So I've been job hunting lately. Reading job postings, doing interviews, talking to engineering teams at like a dozen companies. And I noticed something compared to five years ago when I was last doing this: literally everyone is on Kubernetes now. Every single company I talked to.

Last time I was job hunting that wasn't the case at all. There were basically three camps: the rare Kubernetes adopters, the systemd -on-VM/VPS/EC2 crowd, and the serverless people (Lambda, Cloud Run, etc.).

That surprised me, because where I work we have actual Big Tech-scale problems, so K8s makes obvious sense for us. But a 10-person startup with two services? None of these places were doing microservices or anything close to high scale. So I asked why.

Spoiler: they don't care much about the technical side of K8s.

Why?

A technical interview is actually a great place to ask why, especially when you're talking directly to the CTO. So I did.…