I work on "serving bits". It is not quite a simple as it sounds at our scale. I've specifically worked on optimizing our FreeBSD kernel, along with several other engineers on my team. We're at point where we can serve over 90Gb/s of TLS encrypted traffic (many tens of thousands of TCP streams) from a single-socket 16 core Xeon, without any crypto offloads.
There are a lot of challenging problems in any industry once you dig deep enough. There are tons of brilliant people around me, doing super cool things that I can barely fathom (like the recommendation system). Any one of those things can be trivialized, but each is somebody's pride and joy, and a marvel of design and engineering.
Definitely appreciate you taking the time to respond to my comment. Netflix makes it look easy, so from my outside perspective, its easy to dismiss the problems as "solved".
There are a lot of challenging problems in any industry once you dig deep enough. There are tons of brilliant people around me, doing super cool things that I can barely fathom (like the recommendation system). Any one of those things can be trivialized, but each is somebody's pride and joy, and a marvel of design and engineering.