I have been working in distributed systems for 6 years or so. It is a field ripe with difficult problems and active areas of research. Some things people don’t

I have been working in distributed systems for 6 years or so. It is a field ripe with difficult problems and active areas of research. Some things people don’t even think of as distributed systems suffer from many of the problems inherent in that field. For example, a system using a database with asynchronous replicas - especially if latency is not extremely low - using those replicas for read scaling, is an eventually consistent system (because of replication lag) and suffers from related issues. Multi-master databases are even worse. You get the joys of network partitioning (netsplit or split-brain) and conflicting updates. Sure, there are ways to work around this, but all the workarounds I know of have some rather ugly tradeoffs. Basically, there are many opportunities to do something great, and not be bored. IMHO.