No Experience in NoSQL? No Problem.

I just attended a great talk at the Evanta CDO Chicago event. Sriram Mohan of Avalon Consulting, LLC. and Rose-Hullman Institute of Technology spoke on the challenge of finding people who have Big Data or Enterprise NoSQL skills. This topic really resonated with me because, as a Sales Engineering Director for MarkLogic, I’m looking to hire engineers skilled in both. As Sriram says: Few people have any real experience, so how do you find individuals with skills that can close the gap? What would those skills be?

Faced with the challenge of building a team that can deliver MarkLogic’s Enterprise NoSQL message and use the technology to prove our capabilities, I listened intently to Sriram’s suggestions. These are a few of the skills that stood out:

1. Willingness to learn
2. Not just a programmer; must have a designer’s mindset
3. Solid UNIX experience; Windows is fine, but must understand the UNIX architecture
4. Scripting – Shell, Python, Perl; must be able to stitch processing pipelines together quickly
5. JavaScript, Java programming
6. Understanding of distributed systems
7. SQL experience

There were a few others on Sriram’s list, but these are the ones that validate what I’m targeting in my hires. And because the good professor teaches MarkLogic in his database courses, I hope to see some of his students in the near future!

The final point I gathered from Sriram’s talk was a simple question: “Do you even need Hadoop?” This was an aside, to the skills discussion, but I really think it’s an important question. I often speak with people who “need Hadoop” but aren’t completely sure why. I’ll save that topic for another blog entry. By the way, if you’re interested in working for me, check out open positions at the bottom of this page.