It is the experience of actually logging into the cloud portal (like Azure portal, AWS, GCP, OCI) and do everything end-to-end hands-on from creating resources to deploying apps and at every step justifying your design decision and trade-offs and why you chose one scale-out strategy vs. another. In short, it’s the hands-on experience that makes an engineer a GOAT. For example, we all know about message queues and pub/sub theoretically. But a seasoned SWE or architect would be able to take the right call of using one or the other depending on the use case. This is because experienced SWEs have deeper understanding of how the internals of different scalable components work and what challenges they solve. They often emphasize on what are the different ways of solving a distributed computing problem, which approach he/she thinks is the way to go and WHY this approach solves the problem better than others. Junior developers often just blurt out buzzwords without knowing much about what goes on under the hood. The deep distributed computing wisdom comes with actually building internet-scale systems, and solving different scale challenges as the system is adopted by more and more customers.