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Comment by prima-facie | Hacker News Reader

> If you’re (only) a docker expert, you’re in troubles right now. There are no more jobs looking for docker expertise and you’re dangerously close to unemployable.

> Kubernetes has succeeded where docker failed. Management buy-in.

This must be one of the silliest articles I've read in a long time. Computer science and engineering does not revolve around the latest devops flavour du-jour. It will be something else in three years time anyway.

The real innovation around Docker was taking existing building blocks which were not straightforward to use on their own (linux cgroups, overlayfs) and bringing them under a cohesive package that's accessible to any developer.

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I would say docker's real innovation was the introduction of reproducibility to system software at the OS-level. Or, it was a vote of no-confidence in the old way of patching/upgrading/deploying/building software. Or, static linking won.

The Linux features like cgroups/overlayfs etc that were used to deliver reproducibility at an acceptable performance cost are more of an implementation detail than the actual innovation, imo. I think one of the co-founders of docker might agree [1].

[1]: https://twitter.com/solomonstre/status/1111004913222324225

> Computer science and engineering does not revolve around the latest devops flavour du-jour.

Job postings most definitely do.

This is a silly article really. If a company looks for a specific skill set like Docker or Kubernetes, I think the company is hiring people who would become irrelevant after 5 years because you never know what newfangled orchestration tools would be the "right way to do it" then. Fortunately, companies do not hire in a silly way like this. Sure they write "Kubernetes" as one of the many things in their job descriptions but all companies I have interviewed with would be equally okay to hire someone who demonstrates strong Docker skills or strong sysadmin skills or even strong OS skills.

These skills are transferrable from one implementation to another. It makes no sense in this age to put all our eggs in one Kubernetes basket to be hireable. Expertise of the underlying computer science and engineering is far more important.

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