Yes! I’ve always fallen into this realm in many different fields. My graduate research was in meso-scale chemistry. The physicists would dig down and solve the

Yes! I’ve always fallen into this realm in many different fields. My graduate research was in meso-scale chemistry. The physicists would dig down and solve the quantum mechanics for small systems to crazy high detail. The traditional theoretical chemists would solve big systems using statistical mechanics. My problems were to big to do the quantum with traditional methods and too small to take advantage of ensemble statistics. That’s where the novelty was. Now in computing I do the same. I don’t do fancy buzzword big data and my cloud experience is single instances. But the problems I solve are hard and there’s no magic recipe I can steal from SO to solve them. It’s all novel problem solving. The money is in the meso scale. Small stuff isn’t interesting and the cloud providers have taken the margin out of the big stuff (or at least have taken the margin for themselves). It’s also fun to solve these novel problems...though it does make me a bit of a dinosaur and I can’t complete at getting a job at a FAANG because I don’t do stuff “at scale”.