> Honestly, I think most of the hard real world software problem tend to deal with legacy systems and the near organic mess that builds up over time. Have you

> Honestly, I think most of the hard real world software problem tend to deal with legacy systems and the near organic mess that builds up over time. Have you read papers like: http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/files/amazon-dynamo-sosp2007.pdf http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/files/amazon-dynamo-sosp... http://research.google.com/archive/bigtable-osdi06.pdf http://research.google.com/archive/bigtable-osdi06.pdf http://kowshik.github.com/JPregel/pregel_paper.pdf http://kowshik.github.com/JPregel/pregel_paper.pdf http://www.research.ibm.com/people/m/michael/ieeetpds-2004.pdf http://www.research.ibm.com/people/m/michael/ieeetpds-2004.p... These papers all describe solutions to "hard real world software problems" and have nothing to do with legacy systems. If you think there aren't hard problems in software, you're probably not working on one.