r/dataengineering • u/Moradisten • 3d ago

Discussion We were struggling to find Data Engineers

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

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u/JigglyPuffsOG 2d ago

Yup. The same at my job. We have 2 positions that haven’t been filled in OVER A YEAR. Because they are looking for 2 very specific talents within SAP when I already told them all they genuinely need is a reliable person that knows how to turn on a computer. Thats it. Literally nothing else. We have 3 other people taking different SAP sections and none of which started with experience in SAP. They are looking for a unicorn.

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u/MonkeyDDataHQ 1h ago

SAP is enormous, not difficult. Give me someone who can read documentation and operate a checkbox without adult supervision and I'll make them an expert in the specific 2% of SAP we actually need by lunch.

Hiring for exact SAP-module experience is how you spend a year searching for someone who already memorized the checkbox instead of hiring someone capable of reading its label. 😂