I've worked at a (giant well known) company/bank in New York that basically mandated that people switch jobs internally every 18 to 24 months. It was part of the expectations. I was there for 4 years. I had 3 different roles in 3 different teams.
It helped a lot in fact in doing quality work. Thinking that you will inherit things you didn't do. That some other people will inherit your work / decisions. And always learning new things / keeping best practices in mind.
It's something I've kept in mind everywhere I've been.
We used to run a very well run Kubernetes clusters with a single devops, then two. If you have senior devops engineers who know what they are doing and have the opportunity to greenfield it's really not that bad. We now have 4 devops engineers.
At the end of the day it's not necessarily Kubernetes that's difficult/time consuming, it's all the context around it.
How do you monitor/observability? Security? What's your CI/CD to deploy everything? How do you fully automate everything in reproducible ways within the k8s clusters, and outside?
I've been doing infrastructure management / devops for well over 23 years. Built & managed datacenters running tens of thousands of servers.
Kubernetes and AWS have made my life easier. What's really important is having the right senior people fully aware of the latest practices to get started. Greenfield now is easier than ever.
I absolutely despise open office plans. I can't work in them.
My productivity shot an incredible amount as soon as I had no choice than to work from home in March, and everybody else in the office. Saved 2 hours a day. And I can use my own bathroom... that alone is worth it.