Thank you. I've been doing distributed systems for years, when and to the degree appropriate, but this Worst Of Breed career guidance resource should help me position my skills, for current hiring priorities, to maximize my impact, towards enterprise objectives, going forward.

But seriously, it's not only cynical careerists who are pumping resume keywords like it's a game everyone is playing, and everyone keeps quiet about RDD, etc., because nobody wants to spoil it for everyone. It's also people who are really into one of the keywords, and think it's the most important thing, or the only important thing.

-- Past Case Study #1 --

Context: interview with systems research PhD brand-new founders, after my cold outreach pitch as a "startup generalist" (I think I said it in the headline) who would complement the scientists.

Me: (paraphrased) You're the experts in novel distributed systems research niche X, and I can't help you with that. What I can help with is all the other early startup work you'll need done, like bespoke infrastructure that works with X, Web consoles, mobile apps, some systems programming, product definition, project management, helping academic researchers and industry engineers work together, whatever needs to be done.

PhD founder: (this might be an exact quote) We need an expert, not a generalist.

-- Past Case Study #2 --

Context: interview with a mid-stage startup's CTO, who was hired for distributed systems expertise.

Me: I suspect that a Postgres server on a modest cloud server can handle the entire planet's activity of X. And (since the company's recruiting materials emphasized bias for action, and rapid iteration) we could very quickly build and validate that empirically with simulated transaction load. Of course, in production, we'd set up Postgres with distributed failover, etc.

CTO: I going to need a severalth one-on-one interview with you, an offer is imminent, but it's unclear whether you'll ever be allowed to talk with anyone else on the team, who you pointedly have still not yet met.