Hi everyone. I don't normally ask career advice of people I don't know, but I respect this community, so here goes. I'm a software engineer with about 20 years of experience. I've worked in large and small orgs; on a website/service with 100-500 million monthly active users, and another with 10-50m MAUs; and on Big Science. I work mainly in distributed systems, and have branched out to database implementation in the past 5 years. I really love distsys. The main economic forces that I currently see operating on my career are: (a) the ascendance of the small handful of cloud computing providers; and (b) the remaking of many facets of the economy by AI, much of this to take place in the coming decades. On (a): I'm happy in my current job, but have found that only companies at the largest scale want to pursue the distsys approaches that I'm most interested in (e.g., gossip/CRDTs, consensus algorithms, etc.). Outside of those companies, it's difficult to get f