You have identified some problems - k8s is not fit for your set up, unless you have 1000s of nodes serving an app and tens of such apps. - Software engineers

You have identified some problems - k8s is not fit for your set up, unless you have 1000s of nodes serving an app and tens of such apps. - Software engineers are not going to show any interest in infrastructure as code, as they can make more on the engineering side than on the infra side. Even at Google, I heard, it is hard to become SWE for an SRE, unless he joins as SRE-SWE. This tells that not many want to become SRE-SWE. - What else can you teach to your sysadmin, when he can't learn "owing up to mistakes" in a small shop like yours. Im Mega corps, there is a political cost to "owning up to mistakes" right away. If he can't change, he is not going to learn it. You need someone who wants to learn and show some progress. - Where is your company located?