Go see papers at conferences like OSDI, POSP, SIGMOD. Note how some of the bravest ones are coming from ad serving and e-commerce companies (e.g., the ZooKeeper

Go see papers at conferences like OSDI, POSP, SIGMOD. Note how some of the bravest ones are coming from ad serving and e-commerce companies (e.g., the ZooKeeper paper which is rather amazing). It isn't a mere accident: the technical problem that's being solved is hard and requires these kind of systems to built. The people who join those companies join to solve those kinds of problems, not accidentally decide to solve them. The technical challenges involved in real time auctions and high volume ad serving are a serious technical problem. The optimization and machine learning work to target the ads is another hard technical problem. For many people (myself included) the technical challenge is the most important part of my work, big reason why I want to wake up and head in to the office. When they decide to move on to another company, they'll come away with greater technical skills that could also be applied to smart meters, DNA analysis, physics, pure systems programming work and the like.