I work in data science. Before interviewing at a company, I try to find an engineer and ask them two things:
1. What's your tech stack?
2. Why?
This blatantly disqualifies ~90% of startups which are doing crazy things like using Hadoop for 10gb of data. OTOH, I get really impressed when someone describes effectively using "old" technologies for large amounts of data, or can pinpoint precisely why they use something with reasons other than data size. One good example: "We use Kafka because having a centralized difference log is the best way we've found for several different data stores to read from one source of truth, and we started doing this years ago. If we were starting today, we might use Kinesis on AWS, but the benefits are small compared to the amount of specific infrastructure we've built at this point."
1. What's your tech stack?
2. Why?
This blatantly disqualifies ~90% of startups which are doing crazy things like using Hadoop for 10gb of data. OTOH, I get really impressed when someone describes effectively using "old" technologies for large amounts of data, or can pinpoint precisely why they use something with reasons other than data size. One good example: "We use Kafka because having a centralized difference log is the best way we've found for several different data stores to read from one source of truth, and we started doing this years ago. If we were starting today, we might use Kinesis on AWS, but the benefits are small compared to the amount of specific infrastructure we've built at this point."