Rejected for No Kafka. 40+ Real Projects on My Resume. Fed Up With Hiring.

No production Kafka experience. Rejected. Meanwhile, I replaced an entire monitoring platform for a bank. Built a 634-line universal CI/CD template. Created a healthcare CRM solo that cut processing by 40%. None of that mattered. The recruiter had a checklist. Started in IT in 2016 as a sysadmin doing everything alone. Moved into web development, built a pharma CRM from scratch with no architect, barely knowing JavaScript. Then cloud, CI/CD, IaC - running production infrastructure across industries, across tech stacks I'd never seen before day one. Eight years of figuring things out under pressure. Full monitoring system in KQL for live products. Azure OpenAI integrated for actual team problems, not hype. CI/CD pipelines that saved a team 70% of their deployment time. Running Bosch DevOps infrastructure alone. But no Kafka. I checked the repo after - they use RabbitMQ. The checkbox had nothing to do with the actual work. AWS "too weak" (I deliver on Azure daily). Kubernetes "not architect level" (I rarely build from scratch anyway - neither does anyone else). Python "not backend-grade" (automation IS the point). The market asks for tool names. The job needs someone who figures…