I'm definitely in a different intellectual stage than cperciva, but I find that the more "expertise" I gain (in computation), the more I realize how intractable

I'm definitely in a different intellectual stage than cperciva, but I find that the more "expertise" I gain (in computation), the more I realize how intractable the field is, as a whole. I look at the problems twitter has scaling, and it pains me - that's such an easy-to understand problem, and yet the solution is way beyond the vast majority of engineers' capabilities (probably mine, as well). I like to think I studied at least a standard deviations more than the average student in college, but when people ask me what I learned from majoring in Math and CS, it's that: 1) I know virtually nothing about calculus/chaos theory/topology/linear algebra, very little about set theory, graph theory, or the properties of natural numbers. There are more different systems of formal models (algebra and set theory) that might be useful in describing the world than I will ever have time or energy to learn. 2) I know virtually nothing about computers. I know nothing aside from high level properties of the interfaces between a hard disk, a CPU, memory, and a network. I know virtually nothing about how memory is allocated by the OS, applications, or how/when caches are populated. I know only the very basic of data structures or algorithms, and nothing about distributed or probabilistic algorithms. I don't know how to most optimally model any of the systems from #1 on a computer's architecture. But seeing the problems twitter is having scaling, I imagine neither do most engineers.