I've been running systems in production for half a decade now ever since I got my degree. Not a whole career yet but it's something. I love writing software, but I cannot wait to escape production internet services. There's nothing glorious or noble about them. It's a pain in the ass and I'll let other engineers who seem to like making it their life's work. Investing so much energy in a company who just pays me is not worth my lifetime's career. Luckily doing it for a few years pays well, and software skills are lucrative for things besides managing internet services. So escape is palpable.
The grass looks greener on the other side. Every field has equally complicated problems.
Writing distributable applications (desktop apps) or high performance ones (data analysis tools) or combination of both (video games) comes with a ton of problems equally complicated problems too.
There is lot you take for granted in the server world that is simply not true anywhere else.
- the control you have over hardware (CPU/RAM/Disk) and OS environment where your service runs. You can very easily throw more resources at a problem, if there is memory leak you can kill and restart your dameon, specify the exact combination of dependencies your application can have down to the patch level, update and change your applications at whim 10 times a day, none of this easy or even possible outside the web service context.
- Typical performance challenges are more horizontal than vertical, i.e. to able to support more users is bigger concern than per user/ API call performance, most web service apps are CRUD applications of some sort, while there are performance challenges for a single computation the path to fix or mitigate is not difficult to see. In the systems programming world performance and concurrency for a single user application is very very different beast, you will end up doing lot more math,algorithms than in the web service world.
