> awful technical execution

Leave that out. Many right decisions look stupid later. It will happen to you to. Time makes fools of us all.

This. It’s always important to assume the decisions made before you were correct, or at least a good approximation to correct given the conditions or knowledge at the time. It’s sort of a generalization of chesterson’s fence. If you don’t know why a decision might have been smart at the time, you will likely make another mistake trying to correct it. It may not always be true but thinking this way can at least keep you honest.

The question was one in rhetorical jest, no? Clearly the former statement is "correct"

> "I need X million USD in engineering spend this year to fix half a decade of awful technical execution and decision making (that all happened under your watch, BTW)".

I don't know what is there in the IT/dev industry that compels some characters to quickly whip out blanket accusations of gross incompetence to anyone who isn't them.

This mindset is particularly egregious given that the whole industry has enthusiastically adopted as a best practice just agilying big balls of mud through sequences of quickly delivered stopgap solutions while refactoring and paying off technical debt is seen as wasted effort.

The author of this blog post clearly described refactoring a legacy system that worked reliably in hopes to improve their operations. Yet, here you are accusing someone investing their time and effort to improve their stuff as something that could only be explained as incompetence?

For the purpose of my joke, it doesn't really matter if it's incompetence or intentional under-engineering.

It was a satirical observation (based on my experience) that "the business" tends to scoff at unsexy foundational rework of existing tech. The trendiness of Kubernetes is used effectively to "trojan horse" that kind of work in.

I am jokingly suggesting that at this stage maybe that's the real value of Kubernetes.

"Hey! I have the code wrapped in k8s! it is now serving an endpoint - let's start giving it a small amount of traffic!"

Neither:

"I need X million USD in engineering spend this year because we need to practice DevOps and SRE."

"I need X million USD in engineering spend this year because it would improve my CV"

The author of this blog post states quite clearly that his company already used EKS elsewhere. If all he wanted to do was add a fancy line to his CV, why would he bother with something he already had?

Also, it's silly to just assume that continuing to treat pampered EC2 instances that had to be manually deployed ande cared for is something that benefits a projectsl, specially if the company already shed those bad practices elsewhere.

This reads to me as:

‘I need X million in USD in engineering spend this year so I can add “I managed a large SRE/DevOps team” on my resume.’