A job seeker discovered that every company they interviewed with now runs on Kubernetes, marking a dramatic shift from five years ago when organizations fell into three distinct camps: Kubernetes adopters, VM/systemd users, and serverless advocates. Even small startups with minimal scale have abandoned simpler alternatives for container orchestration.

CTOs consistently cited three organizational drivers for adoption. First, uniform deployment processes eliminate the chaos of mixed infrastructure where some services run on mysterious bash scripts from 2019. Second, Kubernetes serves as a hiring lingua franca — engineers can understand system architecture by reading YAML files rather than relying on tribal knowledge. Third, GitOps workflows through FluxCD or ArgoCD provide audit trails and compliance benefits that compose naturally with the platform.

Interestingly, these companies rarely leverage Kubernetes' advanced technical features. Expect no topologySpreadConstraints, pod disruption budgets, or autoscalers in their manifests. They essentially run the same number of nodes they'd need with VMs, accepting orchestration complexity purely for organizational advantages.

The author recommends skipping Kubernetes until teams grow beyond a single engineer, since debugging clusters demands energy better spent on product development. Simple VPS deployments remain valid emergency fixes when customer calls cannot wait for pod troubleshooting.