[readyna]

Yes one company, I was a generalist software engineer.

I agree that it'd be very weird for any of my colleagues to have touched Kubernetes or the build pipeline (unless that was their entire job). Large companies can afford to let people specialize, but that's not necessarily the case with smaller companies where people need to wear many hats.

It's just pretty apparent that I need to put on more hats to be a competitive candidate, especially when the hat I do wear usually isn't relevant to the companies that are hiring. Large companies also have plenty of teams doing more mainstream work (regular backend dev) even if it doesn't include k8s, so they all still have a leg up on me in this sparse job market.

Of course my problem might disappear when the market recovers and the large companies hire again, but I'm not going to sit around waiting for that.