Ask HN: Do you find working on large distributed systems exhausting?
Yes, I used to,<p>but No, I fixed it :)<p>Among other things, I am team lead for a private search engine whose partner-accessible API handles roughly 500 mio requests per month.<p>I used to feel powerless and stressed out by the complexity and the scale, because whenever stuff broke (and it always does at this scale), I had to start playing politics, asking for favors, or threatening people on the phone to get it fixed. Higher management would hold me accountable for the downtime even when the whole S3 AZ was offline and there was clearly nothing I could do except for hoping that we&#x27;ll somehow reach one of their support engineers.<p>But over time, management&#x27;s &quot;stand on the shoulders of giants&quot; brainwashing wore off so that they actually started to read all the &quot;AWS outage XY&quot; information that we forwarded to them. They started to actually believe us when we said &quot;Nothing we can do, call Amazon!&quot;. And then, I found a struggling hosting company with almost compatible tooling and we purchased them. And I moved all of our systems off the public cloud and onto our private cloud hosting service.<p>Nowadays, people still hold me (at least emotionally) accountable for any issue or downtime, but I feel much better about it :) Because now it actually is withing my circle of power. I have root on all relevant servers, so if shit hits the fan, I can fix things or delegate to my team.<p>Your situation sounds like you will constantly take the blame for other people&#x27;s fault. I would imagine that to be disheartening and extremely exhausting.