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Comment by pbmonster | Hacker News Reader

> Comparing something as vast and broadly reaching as "Cloud" is a disengenous comparison to something as specific as a tool like Google Analytics

Is it? Tons of cloud people I know are very narrowly specialized and certified on AWS or Azure. They certainly don't ever apply for jobs using the other...

I'm sure they could retrain. But I'm also sure they don't want to.

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At this point, being a "cloud" engineer essentially means that you're good at understanding and adapting to new services / value propositions, since they become available quite regularly. It doesn't mean, "really good at EC2, and incapable of learning more."

If I were reviewing resumes and saw someone list themselves as a "cloud engineer", I would make very sure their skills listed the cloud provider used where I was hiring. That title would make me assume they were a specialist in a cloud until I saw otherwise.

That says more about you than them, though. You’re projecting your own inability to translate knowledge into new systems and assume the same of others.

I'm not projecting my inability, I'm assuming incompetence. I'm a cynic, not insecure.

I wouldn't blanket block a resume that said "cloud engineer", I'd just make sure to probe that they aren't just an "AWS engineer" or "Azure engineer".

That is entirely reasonable.

A title I have frequently worked under is “Cloud Engineer”.

I’m strongest in AWS, secondly Azure. But I also am extensively using Linode’s platform and Kubernetes too.

My best friend’s title has also been “Cloud Engineer” and he is exclusively in AWS. He doesn’t really know more about Azure than he needs to get things connected to AAD.

How anyone could know that without asking eludes me. If you’re hiring for a position, you have a responsibility to know.

You know that the big clouds (and to a lesser extent the smaller ones) have more in common than they are different?

They use different jargon, they love to market themselves on their differences (because why compete on price?), but the fundamentals are really very similar and the skills transfer.

Anyone who’s telling you that Cloud X is vastly different from Cloud Y is either trying to sell you something, or has gotten their knowledge from someone who was selling them something.

I work at AWS Professional Services, people move around among AWS ProServe, Google/GCP, and Microsoft/Azure all of the time.

Heck plenty of people come into ProServe with no AWS experience. But they know their areas of specialty well and it only takes a couple of months to use AWS specific services.

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