Kubernetes Is Not DevOps : A Short Story Last week I had the opportunity to interview a candidate for a DevOps position at our company. After a quick introduction, we moved on to the technical part …

Faun

A hiring manager shares an interview experience where a candidate knew Kubernetes commands but couldn't explain what happens internally when running kubectl apply. The story illustrates a broader industry trend: engineers learning tools without understanding the underlying systems. True DevOps expertise goes beyond tool familiarity — it requires understanding infrastructure provisioning, distributed systems, automation principles, and reliability design. Kubernetes is just one tool; the fundamentals of systems thinking and automation will outlast any specific technology.

Kubernetes Is Not DevOps : A Short Story

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There is a partial point to it, but as usual with such requests, there is another pragmatic perspective to it.
For example, tell me a real life pragmatic reason, why it is so important to “at least” know “how the desired state is stored in etcd”. Just 1.
Do you assume <code>kubectl apply</code> might ever become broken and you have to fix it yourself? How would you ever use that information in a real life job scenario?
While there is a point to knowing the behind-the-scenes of what you are doing, the amount of detail actually necessary is really low, to do a good job.
In this article, the workflow described as “high-level” is already pretty low leve, to be honest. It does not add any value to actual real life work tasks, beyond looking “cool” in an interview with the article’s author.
Therefore, I think the interviewer in this scenario has to improve his interview methods and standards of knowledge about the technology used, as he is definitely looking in the wrong direction, expecting the parts of knowledge, which are largely unnecessary to do a good engineering job.

You should be a Sysadmin first to understand how systems actually work. Once you have mastered that foundational knowledge, you become a great DevOps engineer because you truly understand the big picture.
From the network stack to operating system internals, having this background makes it much easier to architect a solution and troubleshoot faults. Otherwise, you are just looking for ‘how-to’ guides or blindly applying AI suggestions without understanding the ‘why’ behind your actions.
Tools like Kubernetes are just abstractions. If you don’t understand what’s happening under the hood, you aren’t managing a system, you are just hoping it works.