I think that people perceive being on call and having to work with messy legacy infrastructure as a restriction on their personal freedom and an anti-perk. We also don't compensate well for oncall shifts so that might be part of the reason that people see it as a lesser form of work and not as a special status that's only given to the best engineers. At other organizations it may be different... I hear FAANG companies compensate their on call shifts quite well (typically a percentage of base salary banded by SLA)

Second time I'm hearing (what's for me) a mile-high comp number for kube jobs and I'm now really tempted.

Working as a data scientist - software engineer in a midsize company, I constantly battle amateur ops folk and "backend" fullstack jockeys from introducing kubernetes into a saas product I mostly created by myself (makes money but there are maybe ten users per hour tops, why would I need kubernetes for that?).

My org has seen multi-day downtimes for the entire eng team workflow because the eks cluster went down and they couldn't figure out how. We have four people dedicated in the infra team for this! I'm not really an ops person but I see where the failings of these folks and stacks are, and feel like I might be able to learn to be half-decent if I put the time. What advice would you give ?

Kubernetes is a full time job. If you want to capture 90% of the benefits of containerization without wasting too much time on a complex solution then simply restrict yourself to only use docker with bash scripts and maybe a load balancer if you really want to have HA.

I've found nomad to have a lower complexity than kubernetes but if you cannot directly integrate service discovery into your application then you will need to use a service mesh which is an all or nothing thing but using something like traefik's support for consul means you will have to use regular service discovery alongside the service mesh. It's not a huge burden but there should be a better way.

> why would I need kubernetes for that?

They need k8s for their, otherwise bleak CV. Its all hype and shiny today.

> (makes money but there are maybe ten users per hour tops, why would I need kubernetes for that?).

The idea is that you move your low traffic app onto servers with other low traffic apps and save money. If they’re just moving your app to a kubernetes cluster by itself it’s probably not worth it.

Whoa where are you seeing these job listings? I don't know if I've ever come across a public listing for a technical role that paid so much.

They don’t really exist. I’m mid career management and hire these types of roles. You go above $200k and you’re just wasting money. There may be a few random openings above this but nothing sustainable once folks realize the talent curve.

They don’t list the salary but the recruiters will tell you — it’s Silicon Valley companies mostly.

Can you share more? I am aware that this comp exists (just see levels.fyi) but haven’t found it for Kubernetes focused roles yet.

Are you talking to FAANG’s? Second tiers like Uber, Square, etc? Other?

Both.