alt Hacker NewsIt's also a matter of "how easy is to find people that are good with X, Y, Z" where X, Y, Z are some niche technologies or offerings compared to the more wildly used ones.
You can start a business in your laundry room if you know how to set up servers and get internet and stuff. But that's gonna be you and maybe a few "hobbyists" that might want to join on that endeavor, but the rest of developers or admins will want to stay far away from that.
Optimizing your business for how is easy is to find talent is also a matter of strategy.
I definitely hire talent that can grow the business, and grow with it.
And that means knowing your 0's and 1's better than knowing how to operate the latest trendy calculator: it's easier to understand the calculator, when you know what it's made of; harder to work your way backwards, although doable.
Yes, finding people that master PostgreSQL clustering (and SLA/RTO tradeoffs) is harder than finding AWS-certified folks, but that deeper knowledge definitely pays off: you understand the tradeoffs why, before you migrate, not after. When you know the fundamentals, you learn their implementation way faster.
The "wildly used", locked-in services are more often than not, built with/over the "niche", no-strings-attached ones.