[porridgeraisin]

I think the reason that distributed systems still are the go-to choice for many software teams is to do with people/career expectations/careers orienting themselves around distributed systems over the time period you mentioned. It will take a while for it to re-orient, and then distributed systems might become a fad again ;) An example of this is typical promotion incentives being easier to get in microservice teams, thereby incentivising people to organize the team/architecture in that way.

[cmrdporcupine]

Honestly, I am more cynical and just think people are always looking for ways to make their jobs more interesting than they actually are.

[EtCepeyd]

FWIW, at least one other comment seems to correlate job complexity with job security: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43197623

[cmrdporcupine]

I work in embedded and it's absolutely not "less complex"

[davemp]

For sure. Maybe less accidental complexity. Embedded has been doing asynchronous IO since before it was cool. You also have distributed computing if you’re doing something like sensor networks.

[Nevermark]

> Honestly, I am more cynical and just think people are always looking for ways to make their jobs more interesting than they actually are.

When you frame the problem that way, unnecessary complexity seems like part of a healthy solution path. /h

Companies get reliability benefits from slack, but creative people abhor wasted slack. Some basic business strategy/wisdom for maintaining/managing creative slack is needed.