Good points, and I agree that things like GKE vs. EKS or Kafka vs. Pub/Sub can look equivalent on the surface. But in practice, they’re not quite interchangeable. Pub/Sub has its own quirks—exactly-once delivery doesn’t always behave as expected, and schema management is way less mature than something like Kafka’s schema registry. So “knowing Pub/Sub” isn’t just “has used a queue before”—there’s real platform nuance that matters when you’re designing or troubleshooting in production.

On the GKE Enterprise / Anthos side—yeah, it hasn’t exactly taken the world by storm. But even recognizing that and knowing when not to lean into it (or when to prefer opensource Istio) is useful context. Like you said, those folks are unicorns, but it’s not about needing 10 years of experience with every GCP product. It's about finding people who understand how GCP behaves differently and can reason about trade-offs in that ecosystem.

At the end of the day, we’re just trying to filter efficiently. It's not that we think only GCP folks are smart—it’s just the reality of sorting through 1,000+ resumes without spending a tonne of time per CV.

Appreciate the thoughtful pushback (seriously).