Kubernetes and retiring at the top with Kelsey Hightower

**Gergely Orosz** (0:00)
Kelsey Hightower is known as one of the most influential voices in the Kubernetes community. But you wouldn't guess from how his career started. At 19, he dropped out of college to be a DSL modem installer, became a self-taught developer, and still went on to become a distinguished engineer at Google. At age 43, he then retired at the very top of the industry. Today, we cover Kelsey's unconventional path into tech, and how he kept creating new opportunities for himself, often unknowingly. The inside story of the Container Wars, Puppet, Docker, Terraform, CoreOS, and how Kubernetes eventually won. Going from a Google IC to executive level, and how he rejected a Microsoft offer from Satya Nadella himself, and still doubled his compensation. His grounded and pragmatic advice for software engineers, worried about being commoditized by AI, and so much more. If you're an engineer and thinking about your long-term career trajectory, whether that's getting into a staff plus level, going independent, or even quietly planning to leave the industry, this episode is for you. This episode is longer than a normal episode, frankly because I was so glued to my chair, mostly listening to Kelsey's stories and thinking. This episode was presented by Antisysys.
Verify your system's correctness without human review or traditional integration tests, and avoid bugs or outages. Before we start, I'd like to mention our presenting sponsor, Antisysys, and maybe offer a little history lesson. Over the last two decades, software development has gone through a mindset shift from an imperative approach to the declarative one. Infrastructure is a perfect example. Think about how tools like Puppet and Ansible allow declaring how individual servers should be configured. Then came Terraform, the ability to declare the desired end state of your whole infrastructure, servers, networks, databases, and their relationships.
And then with Kubernetes, we stop scripting container life cycles. Instead, we write manifests that say things like, I want three replicas of this application exposed behind the surface with this much CPU and memory. Once we didn't have to specify every little detail of our infrastructure anymore, deploying software became much faster. But then the bottleneck became how quickly we could test and verify the code to be deployed. Testing remained imperative. We had to write tests for every little detail. And now with LLMs, we're on the verge of a declarative shift in the way code is written as well. Just tell the model what you want and let it figure out the details. And it's going to make the verification bottleneck a million times worse. Antisysys is a declarative testing tool that can keep up with your AI coding agents. You state the properties you want your software to have, and Antisysys figures out how to check them for you. Verify your code as fast as agents can write it, and ship with ground and confidence. Head to insistences.com/pragmatic.
Kelsey, welcome to the podcast. It's so nice to see you in person.

**Kelsey Hightower** (2:35)
Yeah, I'm actually happy to be here, mainly because I kind of look at your stuff over the years, so it's an honor to be here in Amsterdam as well.

**Gergely Orosz** (2:41)
How did you make your first dollar at a job?

**Kelsey Hightower** (2:45)
Oh, my first dollar at a job, McDonald's.
Right, that counts, so in high school, you get the job that's closest to you, so it was in walking distance of my house. As soon as I turned legal age, 14, get a work permit, and I went there and it was one of those jobs where, you know, you go, you fill out the application the same day, you typically get your information or you're going to get hired the same day. When can you start? I'm like, right now.
They go get a shirt for you in the back. What size do you wear? I have men's large.
And the one thing I liked about that job is you're dealing with real people better in a hurry. I guess one bad part about the job, you know, a lot of people don't respect people who have that job. So to kind of look at you, it's just like this intermediary thing between them and what they want. But there's so many things that go into a restaurant like that is very efficient.
You know, people have expectations. I learned how to run the whole store. So by the time I turned 15, I was a assistant manager. So nights and weekends, you know, other managers would leave. They would give this 15-year-old the keys. And I knew how to do everything there, including close out the store, right? So you have to count all the money. You have to fax this huge spreadsheet to corporate every night. And then my mom would pick me up. And so it was really good learning how to really be responsible, even for adults at that age. So that's how I got my first dollar.