Job satisfaction through new shiny tech things.

It's why many brilliant minds appear to be quite content working for unethical tech giants, advertising or surveillance companies.

The reason why the company exists doesn't matter to them.

What the company actually does outside of their computer doesn't matter to them.

The technology and their freedom to pursue the New does. Companies love the production and enthusiasm they provide and pay well for it.

(Usually these types of developers do have a conscience and it's often taken up, used and displayed in worthwhile and benevolent corporate friendly style social activism)

What you say is true, and I read it as a positive not a negative. The "unethical" part is subjective so the manipulation doesn't get to me.

I see this as positive because computer nerds (I'm one) get to be paid very well to figure out the new and shiny. It's what I'd be doing at home anyway.

Most of the time nothing of value is created (Except my amusement), but every once in a while something brilliant is, and due to scale, it can have big impact.

> The "unethical" part is subjective so the manipulation doesn't get to me.

Good specialist engineers designed gas chambers in Nazi Germany

Apparently you're not supposed to make comparisons to Nazi Germany (Godwin's law if you want to be too-online about it); it's considered gauche I suppose. What's funny is that that strikes me as a really good rule to follow if you do in fact want to sleepwalk your society into an analogue of Nazi Germany.

Seeing as the closer in ideology you seem to have to be to make such claims, I don’t believe what you’re saying is true for a second.

I wouldn’t say this is scope creep. This is intentional resume driven development. Someone is ticking through checkboxes so they can say they’ve done X. I can say with experience that on small teams this can really grind productivity to halt really quickly. It’s often masked by a desire to solve all the problems. Well the problem with that is that no problems are solved, although certainly more are created.

Useful for burning company's money, perhaps?

PS. What you describe seems to be not even about PoC (the rule about PoC is that it should work at all), but about following the herd and inventing a setup to appear busy. But that'd be also not very good environment to stay at, as an employee..

Bet the guys are also the ones most promoted. This is so screwed up.

Scope creep will kill any project, Kubernetes or not.

No. This (and many others) are just cases of "if you can't walk, don't try to run".

You could say most people can run if they master walking first.

The problem is that companies take a Java 5 monolith without any CI/CD and want to take rewriting AND re-platforming AND business changes all at once in a giant project. Then they pick the technology that is anyone might be blaming and run with that excuse so it's nobody's fault.

In FAANG adjacent companies it is very difficult to get promos. And promos are the only way to get increase in pay due to leveling.

Promos require promo packs, and promo packs require large beefy projects. (Good luck jack of all trades).

Thus, you end up with these situations where large beefy projects are solutions looking for a problem as the core problem being solved is a promo, not a business need.

This is really it. You get what is incentivized.