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287 points shadaj | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.609s | source
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bsnnkv ◴[] No.43196091[source]
Last month I switched from a role working on a distributed system (FAANG) to a role working on embedded software which runs on cards in data center racks.

I was in my last role for a year, and 90%+ of my time was spent investigating things that went "missing" at one of many failure points between one of the many distributed components.

I wrote less than 200 lines of code that year and I experienced the highest level of burnout in my professional career.

The technical aspect that contributed the most to this burnout was both the lack of observability tooling and the lack of organizational desire to invest in it. Whenever I would bring up this gap I would be told that we can't spend time/money and wait for people to create "magic tools".

So far the culture in my new embedded (Rust, fwiw) position is the complete opposite. If you're burnt out working on distributed systems and you care about some of the same things that I do, it's worth giving embedded software dev a shot.

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1. DaiPlusPlus ◴[] No.43196159[source]
> I switched from a role working on a distributed system [...] to embedded software which runs on cards in data center racks

Would you agree that, technically (or philosophically?) that both roles involved distributed systems (e.g. the world-wide-web of web-servers and web-browsers exists as a single distributed system) - unless your embedded boxes weren't doing any network IO at all?

...which makes me genuinely curious exactly what your aforementioned distributed-system role was about and what aspects of distributed-computing theory were involved.