Being part of a team who is designing and running a globally distributed system has been the best 5 years of my 20 year tech career. Things go wrong sure, and it’s hard, but is crazy rewarding and intellectually challenging in all the right ways. I never quite got that when I was a full stack web dev.
I wrote a post on what a distributed system engineer is, at least from our perspective at Ably Realtime. See https://blog.ably.io/what-is-a-distributed-systems-engineer-... if you’re interested in what it’s like.
Matt, tech co-founder Ably, www.ably.io