Ask HN: If Kubernetes is the solution, why are there so many DevOps jobs?

I agree with this 100%. We're in the infancy of DevOps.

Ironically, "DevOps" started as a philosophy that developers should be able to do operations, e.g. deploy, monitor their apps without relying on external people (previously called Sys Admins, etc). Yet, we're at a stage where the "DevOps" role has become the most prevalent one. IMO things have temporarily gotten slightly worse to get much better later.

From the productivity standpoint, it is not acceptable that a Machine Learning engineer or a Full Stack Developer are expected to know Kubernetes. Or that they need to interact with a Kubernetes person/team. It is an obstacle for them to produce value.

Kubernetes is not THE solution. It's just an intermediate step. IMO, in the long run there'll be very few people actually working with technologies like Kubernetes. They'll be building other, simpler tooling on top of it, to be used by developers.

You already named few examples. I can name few more:

  - Railway.app
  - Vercel
  - Render
  - fly.io
  - probably many more under way

From what I've seen, most developers either aren't systems thinkers or are too busy to take a step back and spot and eliminate redundancy. The best way I can explain this is that many software processes and pipelines within companies are usually complex Directed Acyclic Graphs and very often Transitive Reduction [1] is not applied to these processes.

At the end of transitive reduction, you end up with a graph with all redundant dependencies removed but functionally, it is still the same graph.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transitive_reduction

From my experience, Kubernetes drastically reduces the number of DevOps people required. My current place has a team of 5, compared to a similarly sized, vmware-centric place I worked at a decade ago with a team of 14.

But DevOps means many things because it's not clearly defined, which also makes it difficult to hire for. It's a "jack-of-all-trades" role that people somehow fell into and decided to do instead of more traditional software engineering.

Also, from what I've experienced from our internship program, CS programs are really bad at covering these fundamentals. Students aren't learning such basics as version control, ci/cd, cloud platforms, linux, etc.

Simple, because they before the company had 2-3 beefy servers running some binaries and it handled all the load without problems.

Now because of new possibilities, and new development they want to switch to Kubernetes to have that new possibilities everyone is talking about, and now you have to build many new containers, configure k8s, autoscalling etc... and developers don't know it (yet) and don't have time to learn it.

So lets hire a DevOps (me) that will do it ;-)

New technology sometimes creates more work even though it makes the previous work easier. When the electronic spreadsheet was introduced in the 1980s, even though it made accountants more productive, the number of accountants GREW after the electronic spreadsheet was introduced. Sure, one accountant with an electronic spreadsheet could probably do the work of 10 or 100 accountants who didn't have the electronic spreadsheet, but accounting become so efficient that so many more firms wanted accountants.

"since 1980, right around the time the electronic spreadsheet came out, 400,000 bookkeeping and accounting clerk jobs have gone away. But 600,000 accounting jobs have been added." Planet Money, May 17, 2017, Episode 606: Spreadsheets!