[lucdurette]

This post is spot on, I work in big data. I get ask to change job on a weekly basis. When you tell them the salary, they usually say it's not possible withn a olot of dumb excuses, even though the job description will list every big data technologies in existence plus all the cloud vendor. They want a senior with experience but with an associate Eng. salary bracket. They'll tell you they can't find anyone though. Also what I've seen, if you don't check one box in your past experience. They don't want to take a chance. I think any employes should consider the ccandidata learn some of his skills, most tech workers are usually looking for another challenge because they want to learn something new. The US job market is filled with employer with impossible criteria to meet. Sad state of affairs.

[duxup]

Yeah big data seems to be a place where this absurdity is amplified. Everyone wants the same small handful of people with those qualifications and everyone is like 10x the number of people... and none of them want to budge on what they offer / will take.

In the meantime plenty of good folks out there willing to get into it, but naw they won't take them.

[mmt]

A more subtle problem, besides employers not willing to pay with money, is that, more often than not, they can't actually "pay" with interesting work (or experience or growth or something similar).

Complaining about companies thinking (or just saying) they have "big data" when all they have is moderately-sized data is more common on HN now. What's more, even the very low bar of "fits in main memory" increases rapidly enough that "big" from a couple years ago might not be any more.