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The mythical Hadoop skills gap Posted on : May 22 - 2015

There first rule of the Hadoop skills club: Don’t talk about the Hadoop skills club. That said, plenty of talent is out there. But you're looking for it wrong.

I called it first: We’re already in the trough of disillusionment with big data in general and Hadoop in particular. Now the press is overwrought about a “Hadoop pullback,” though we on the ground have yet to experience it.

The top reason cited is lack of skills and familiarity, which in English means they couldn’t get the project off the ground because they couldn’t find enough of the right people. If you’re already in the big data business, this won’t mean anything to you, because it means that demand exceeds supply. You can then crack open a bottle of bubbly -- you can afford it.

Inflated IT salaries create distortions in the market. At the moment, it's generally cheaper to poach people from other companies than it is to train and grow your talent. This assumes you can find the right people to poach. But hey, I can help.

There is no skills gap -- the IT recruiting industry is full of idiots

Hadoop is hard, but frankly, the idiotic buzzword-matching to skills make no sense. Here's the relevant experience prospective candidates should have even if they don't know Hadoop:

 

HDFS: Any distributed file system, or a reasonable understanding of how RAID works along with Linux shell skills. Frankly, you mostly need to be able to explain over and over why you can’t put HDFS on the SAN to your EMC-loving network and storage team.  View more