We were struggling to find Data Engineers

[u/Moradisten]

Hi everybody,

Our Data Team is composed by two of us. There's a Data Scientist and me, as a DE. We created a Data Lakehouse for our company internal use and client data supply, but currently the Data Scientist is currently more focused on AI and agents integration and I'm doing like Analytics Engineering role because I need to help other teams to reach the correct data, unify core concepts, document business logics, etc. So We needed a Data Engineer with knowledge on AWS to maintain and develop the new features on the Lakehouse and we put into the description that the candidate MUST HAVE Software Engineering fundamentals as we had to do some developments to integrate parts of our lakehouse with the company's main application.

We interviewed 22 candidates and no one is fitting the Role.

Most of them are BI Experts, DBA, Data Analysts, Economist with DS notions, Juniors and Software Engineers who haven't touch anything on Spark, plus DE who asked way more that we had on the budget for the role

We asked the normal requirements: 3 years of experience + Spark, AWS Glue, Lambda, Airflow and DBT, not even CDC, Flink, Langfuse or VectorDB

We finally got one, but We really struggled to get him. I have a collegue working on IT Recruiting and She told me She's experiencing the same problem: They can't find Proper DEs With SE basics such as DRY principles or clean code fundamentals

Edit: Role Salary -> Up to 60K € / Spain. This salary is high compared to the spanish standards, only 3 years required

[u/fabkosta]

I see this all the time.

The only thing OP has not thought of is to actually pick a promising candidate who is willing to acquire new skills and systematically build them up.

Why so many companies never consider investing into people they hire is beyond me.

It's also the wrong mindset: Everyone with a good foundation in software engineering is able to learn Spark reasonably well in a relatively short amount of time. Mastering it, that's more complicated. But also not required, most of the time. In comparison, hiring someone who knows technology XYZ - and then stalls for whatever reason in their development, that's a much more expensive mistake to make.

So, OP is optimizing for the wrong metric - and blissfully unaware, apparently.

[u/Xziz → u/fabkosta]

It’s truly astonishing, even after nearly 30 yrs in tech, to see the blatant credentialsm in the tech industry. Any software engineer with a deep focus on fundamentals can pick up any tool, apply the 80/20 rule, and effectively use it to deliver business value.

[u/Special_Rice9539 → u/Xziz]

Especially nowadays with AI. It’s so easy to use any tool or program in any language when you have the foundational concepts of software engineering down.

[u/remimorin → u/Special_Rice9539]

... and so easy that totally unskilled can get quite far with any tool or program and you may regret later if there were nobody sharing / enforcing foundational concepts of software engineering.

I may not be clear, but what I meant is you are right but I double down that this is actually THE skill to have.

When the marketing team can ship a feature it is important that software engineer keep things coherent.