Kelsey Hightower
Self-taught engineer who became a distinguished engineer at Google Cloud and one of the most visible voices in the Kubernetes community; he retired from full-time work in 2023 and now advises and invests.
Kelsey Hightower did not write this page.
We collected these quotes from things they published elsewhere, and every quote links to where it was said. They have no account here and have not endorsed this site. Quotes are word for word; the short line under each one is our own restatement, not their wording. Their own site. Is this you? Claim it or ask us to remove it. Or tell us what is wrong here.
-
Their wordsand it turns out people kind of over glorify entrepreneurship. I think a lot of people believe there is tremendous upside, right? the type of entrepreneurship we talk about with software companies, the the upside is crazy. But when you're doing like selling parts or service business, unless you plan to open lots of stores and you know grow a larger employee base, it's not the same growth trajectory as software companies.
↗Kubernetes and retiring at the top with Kelsey Hightoweryoutube.com 1st of 28 in this recording
-
Their wordsAnd it's the first time I learned the difference between activities and impact. activity is you being an all-star answering a bunch of calls, but the ticket queue for the team is still high.
↗Kubernetes and retiring at the top with Kelsey Hightoweryoutube.com 2nd of 28 in this recording
-
Their wordsAnd what I learned from the puppet days, every presentation is an interview. I don't think a lot of people think about it that way cuz people are looking at you on stage and they get to see what you're about.
↗Kubernetes and retiring at the top with Kelsey Hightoweryoutube.com 3rd of 28 in this recording
-
Their wordsI think the number one success criteria was docker so remember there was mos and msosphere and they had their own runtime corp had come out with nomad and they had their own runtime but the biggest runtime that had already got global consensus was docker
↗Kubernetes and retiring at the top with Kelsey Hightoweryoutube.com 4th of 28 in this recording
-
Their wordsThey tried to take the Docker API which worked really well for one node and expand it across multiple systems and it was not the right API to scale to another type of thing that we needed. And so they kept trying. They tried to add storage. They tried to add networking but the Docker API was never meant for that.
↗Kubernetes and retiring at the top with Kelsey Hightoweryoutube.com 5th of 28 in this recording
-
Their wordswe went from infrastructure is code to infrastructure is data and infrastructure is code is like if this do that um bring in this module for loops all this stuff and Kubernetes is like no no no you have to specify exactly the containers you want how much memory that they need and then we have the status field to tell you if they were running or not
↗Kubernetes and retiring at the top with Kelsey Hightoweryoutube.com 6th of 28 in this recording
-
Their wordsThe thing that makes Kubernetes powerful, there's a data model. We gave infrastructure a type system. So instead of imperative shell scripts, you finally had types.
↗Kubernetes and retiring at the top with Kelsey Hightoweryoutube.com 7th of 28 in this recording
-
Their wordsSo you have a lot of smart Googlers. These people are brilliant. I mean extremely brilliant to the point where the hardest problem Google had in my opinion was what to build. Not how to build it, what to build.
↗Kubernetes and retiring at the top with Kelsey Hightoweryoutube.com 8th of 28 in this recording
-
Their wordsSo launches is we ship the thing, people have a big celebration. I know that doesn't matter as much as the landing. People are actually paying for it.
↗Kubernetes and retiring at the top with Kelsey Hightoweryoutube.com 9th of 28 in this recording
-
Their wordsAt that moment, you are actually worth $120,000. Cuz you now have evidence from the market. The $100,000 you currently make doesn't look so good anymore. You can't unsee a job offer for 120.
↗Kubernetes and retiring at the top with Kelsey Hightoweryoutube.com 10th of 28 in this recording
-
Their wordsSo the money started to become like freedom tokens. This money means I can get out of the game.
↗Kubernetes and retiring at the top with Kelsey Hightoweryoutube.com 11th of 28 in this recording
-
Their wordsBut the thing I was careful not to do was to change the lifestyle because I I watched people around me change the lifestyle so you can make a lot of money and still be broke.
↗Kubernetes and retiring at the top with Kelsey Hightoweryoutube.com 12th of 28 in this recording
-
Their wordsif you just do productivity, you're going to miss everything. You're going to miss the experience. You're going to miss this part that are hard. You're going to miss the collaboration with your team.
↗Kubernetes and retiring at the top with Kelsey Hightoweryoutube.com 13th of 28 in this recording
-
Their wordsIt is a luxury to be able to afford to go slow because when you're really, really busy, you need an admin because you can't afford to book your own tickets. When you're really busy, you cannot afford to clean your own house.
↗Kubernetes and retiring at the top with Kelsey Hightoweryoutube.com 14th of 28 in this recording
-
Their wordsThere have been countries that have gone through currency resets. This is not a nice experience because if you had a little bit of money, a currency reset can mean you have now no money. If you had no money, it may feel like it's impossible to ever get any more money. If you're retired, what do you do during a currency reset?
↗Kubernetes and retiring at the top with Kelsey Hightoweryoutube.com 15th of 28 in this recording
-
Their wordsNow, I post things like, "Hey, I'm adopting the zero token architecture." People like, "What's zero token architecture?" as like instead of burning tokens, you learn things and you think for yourself and just complete tasks.
↗Kubernetes and retiring at the top with Kelsey Hightoweryoutube.com 16th of 28 in this recording
-
Their wordsMaybe it's arguable that they have their own worldview based on that. And maybe it's slightly different, but I can never put the machine over a person under any circumstance.
↗Kubernetes and retiring at the top with Kelsey Hightoweryoutube.com 17th of 28 in this recording
-
Their wordsIt's like maybe you don't understand what the job has always been. We are trying to solve human problems and we use whatever technology is required. In some cases, the technology happens to be software and software ain't required for every human endeavor.
↗Kubernetes and retiring at the top with Kelsey Hightoweryoutube.com 18th of 28 in this recording
-
Their wordsdo not say AI because what we don't want to do is use a big umbrella to describe what you're doing. Let's get concrete details. These are computers. These are computer programs.
↗Kubernetes and retiring at the top with Kelsey Hightoweryoutube.com 19th of 28 in this recording
-
Their wordsIf you all pivot to AI, then you all will have a problem. It's like kids learning to play soccer. They all run to the ball. No strategy. Spread out, figure where you add value and play your position.
↗Kubernetes and retiring at the top with Kelsey Hightoweryoutube.com 20th of 28 in this recording
-
Their wordsSo if you find yourself generating the same blocks of code over and over, even though it feels fast or convenient, it is still insane.
↗Kubernetes and retiring at the top with Kelsey Hightoweryoutube.com 21st of 28 in this recording
-
Their wordsYou have to call like seven APIs to get a VM in the cloud. Create a VM, a network, a storage device connected to a VPC and then attach credentials. Like that's not intent based. I want a VM.
↗Kubernetes and retiring at the top with Kelsey Hightoweryoutube.com 22nd of 28 in this recording
-
Their wordsSo I'm looking at this like guys the fundamentals of this isn't like everything is going to change because of MCP. What the hell? A whole conference guys? This is just API design.
↗Kubernetes and retiring at the top with Kelsey Hightoweryoutube.com 23rd of 28 in this recording
-
Their wordsI'm watching people write these huge markdown files to give the agent context. How about you write documentation to give me context so I can have fully working examples.
↗Kubernetes and retiring at the top with Kelsey Hightoweryoutube.com 24th of 28 in this recording
-
Their wordsAnd so you have been part of the change to other industries and other people yourself. What did you think about that? Did you even think about it at all? So let's not be surprised if you find no sympathy from all the other professions that you've helped force change upon.
↗Kubernetes and retiring at the top with Kelsey Hightoweryoutube.com 25th of 28 in this recording
-
Their wordsAll you had to do was write code and you were safe. And you probably made more money than everybody and you were fine with that. Now you got caught. The only thing you were good at is now been commoditized.
↗Kubernetes and retiring at the top with Kelsey Hightoweryoutube.com 26th of 28 in this recording
-
Their wordsBut if you ever want to get better at anything, and sometimes that depth, that nuance is the thing that leads to an invention, right? If you know how a compiler works, if you know how memory management works, that might give you enough information to say, "Oh, I can make a new programming language."
↗Kubernetes and retiring at the top with Kelsey Hightoweryoutube.com 27th of 28 in this recording
-
Their wordsBut make no mistake, if we put this much effort in training the model so that it can spit things out, you better make sure that you are willing to train your own model.
↗Kubernetes and retiring at the top with Kelsey Hightoweryoutube.com 28th of 28 in this recording