1
Ask HN: Why are distributed systems so polarizing?
There is an odd gatekeeping duality on tech forums:
1. You're not a proper engineer if you can't write scalable, highly available software that scales to infinity. Real engineers write production-grade, robust, fault tolerant, scalable, highly available, observable mission-critical systems.
2. No one actually needs large distributed systems, you're not google, stop trying to build large scalable systems. One Server + backup is enough. Everything else is overkill, complexity, resume-driven engineering. I can handle 50k RPS with one beefy bare metal machine, written in Rust. Unless you have 10 million customers, which 99.9% of companies don't have.
I'm not sure how to feel about this.