[ublaze]

Yeah, large-scale systems are often boring in my experience, because the scale limits what features you can add to make things better. Each and every decision has to take scale into account, and it's tricky to try experimenting.

I think it has to do with the kind of engineer you are. Some engineers love iterating and improving such systems to be more efficient, more scalable, etc. But it can be limiting due to the slower release cycles, hyper focus on availability, and other necessary constraints.

[harshaw]

I don't think they are boring, but very important on the kind of engineer you are. At AWS I try to encourage people who like the problem space and at the very least appreciate it, but can totally understand that you don't want to do your entire career on it. Many of our younger folks have never felt the speed and joy you can get with hammering out a simple app (web, python, ML) that doesn't have to work at scale.