[autodidacticon]

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.).

Can this be disproven? Are there companies of smaller scale that are attempting to solve these problems?

[ta473589]

I would also say, having worked a company of smaller scale trying to solve distsys problems, that they're hard to sell. But the distsys skill set does seem (to me) marketable at the large cloud providers.

[ta473589]

There are definitely companies at smaller scale that work on these problems. I would say that the only time it really feels solved to me is if the scale is very large.