I find it "exhilirating," not "exhausting." But I also don't think that "...your average engineer should now be able to handle all this." That is where we went

I find it "exhilirating," not "exhausting." But I also don't think that "...your average engineer should now be able to handle all this." That is where we went completely wrong as an industry. It used to be said that what we work on is complex, and you can either improve your tools or you can improve your people. I've always held that you will have to improve your people. But clever marketing of "the cloud" has held out the false promise that anyone can do it. Lies, lies, and damn lies, I say! Unless you have bright and experienced people at the top of a large distributed systems company, who have actually studied and built distributed systems at scale, your experience of working in such a company is going to suck, plain and simple. The only cure is a strong continuous learning culture, with experienced people around to guide and improve the others.