That was partially my point. It doesn't matter if you're doing systems engineering, high frequency finance trading, web development, games development, database

That was partially my point. It doesn't matter if you're doing systems engineering, high frequency finance trading, web development, games development, database systems creation, mobile app development, or working with embedded systems. Most of the problems you run into are solved. But when you work with any of these fields at length, new and largely unsolved problems crop up. That's not unique to people working on cache systems. Whenever you're in a field that runs into scaling/performance issues (which is all of them), you run into hard problems. If you were to do a 180 and go into a job building database engines instead of web sites, guess what? Most of the stuff you deal with has been blogged about, answered on StackOverflow, and is generally a solved problem. Where does it break down into tough programming? Making it perform bleeding fast. Same goes for web development, and games, and so on. It might _seem_ like web development is more trivial than the rest, but that's just a common misconception.