> Aside from academic positions, there is not much opportunity in the market.
May I ask what you mean? I didn't formally study distributed system, but it seems like much of my daily struggle as an engineer is trying to deal with folks who are trying to implement consistent solutions in an eventually consistent world. For me, distributed computing lies beneath every non-trivial programming challenge I'm working on. Even OPs front-end JS talking to the back-end is distributed.
May I ask what you mean? I didn't formally study distributed system, but it seems like much of my daily struggle as an engineer is trying to deal with folks who are trying to implement consistent solutions in an eventually consistent world. For me, distributed computing lies beneath every non-trivial programming challenge I'm working on. Even OPs front-end JS talking to the back-end is distributed.