I have been working as a software engineer for the past 10 years (just after getting my degree in Computer Science). I like to believe I have a solid understanding of the fundamentals of programming and software engineering: from automata theory, to compilers, generics, OOP, functional programming, SOLID, MVC, etc. I have read almost all the "N books every software engineer must read". I have been working with multiple programming languages and frameworks and in a variety of sectors (fin tech, e-commerce, automobile, etc.) While I can setup servers and databases (e.g., the typical nginx + mysql + ssh keys + ansible + bash scripting + a bit of terraform), infra topics is not my A game. I have been looking at the market (I would like to switch jobs) and 9 out of 10 job descriptions for senior backend engineers include in their "must" section knowledge about infrastructure topics such as Docker, K8s, GCP/AWS, CI/CD. Five or 10 years ago such topics were stated in the "nice to have" section of tech job descriptions for senior software engineers. Nowadays, it seems that companies care more about you being able to pack your code in a Docker image using GitLab CI/CD pipeline and write yaml files to describe the state of your K8s cluster.Companies seem to value much more knowledge about GCP than functional programming or OOP. "Oh, you know why one should not parse HTML using regular expressions? Well, that's cute, but do you know how to setup oauth2-proxy in our K8s cluster? You don't? Oh well, thank you for coming."