Hi, I started browsing issues section just to report about this issue with this question. Few further observations about this issue (the asked question is "to terminate the the cron job" if it takes more than 17 seconds to start execution after its schedule):

1. startingDeadlineSeconds doesn't offer any cronjob termination. It just captures that specific job instantiation as failure. Infact, there is no such property for cron job to terminate the cron job itself.
2. The question & the provided solution would have been correct if it is worded to terminate the job that is associated with the cronjob if it exceeds more than 17 seconds. Because each cronjob instantiation creates a new job and new pods within that job, hence terminating that new job would had made sense.

thanks! Feel free to create a PR with the suggested solution :)