How to spot a fake Big Data Engineer

I interview a lot of candidates… I mean a LOT.

And every resume I get these days has a “Big Data Project” listed.

So, naturally, my first question is – what is it that made it a “Big Data” project?

Top five immediate disquallification answers are:

1. We were using Hadoop
2. We had TONS of data
3. We were running map reduce jobs
4. The data was unstructured
5. It wasn’t in our data warehouse

The truth is, no one knows what you mean when you say it was a “Big Data” project – and we all know it is on your resume as keyword search fodder – but if you are going to have it on there you better come with a better answer than one of the five above.