I 100% agree with this. I don't see how the average internal platform-engineering team or "devops" team will be a better platform-engineering team than AWS/GCP etc.
This is exactly how I've been selling the whole idea of hardcore, cloud-native to leadership & our customers. Most responses begin something like:
"By leveraging the capabilities of a multi-trillion dollar Death Star ..."
The objective is to get completely out of the game of managing VMs, certificates, authentication, MFA, et. al. There is no way in hell we can do a better job than any cloud provider when it comes to compliance, consistency, security, etc.
Maybe when we have 10k+ employees we can reconsider the benefits of suffering additional complexity.
I'm an engineering manager and find it hard to relate to this. With 1:1s, ops reviews, planning, retros, design reviews, support syncs, etc., I have ~6-10 hours of meetings per day - then for non-meeting work I'm writing roadmaps, interviewing, managing escalations, doing project management, status reports, etc. How do you have 80% of your time free as a manager after this? I think that makes sense to code if you have that time, but my experience is that having that much time available as a manager would be an outlier.
