Pros
- smart engineers but poor management / leadership - Hortonworks used to have a good open source reputation but that hasn't carried over to Cloudera post-merger (people don't trust Cloudera on open source as they'd insisted on a semi-proprietary strategy for 10 years)
Cons
- Cloudera is dead, everyone I've talked to is migrating off it - everyone I've talked to hates Cloudera's account management attitude, inflexibility and very high licensing costs (we're paying almost as much as for SAS and Teradata sigh - also legacy vendors) - Hortonworks exit from the market via "merger" in to Cloudera has caused a collapse in user and market confidence - as evidenced by a big drop in the share price in mid 2019 and sudden departure of CEO Tom Riley (I always thought of him as the 80s wall street guy from the Futurama episode Futurestock - if you haven't seen it, you will recognize a lot of the Big Data hype) - cloud is easier, more flexible and more mature - cloud is cheaper - cloud may be the new proprietary, but given Cloudera's licensing costs if you're gonna pay you may as well pay less - people are sick of this outdated technology - eg. multiple half-baked SQL-on-Hadoop frameworks and HDFS sucks - nobody seems to want to use that stuff any more for new implementations - many guys I know got burnt out at Hortonworks and Cloudera - poor work-life balance (it's hard to learn and make this technology work) - they've run out of time - the platform has been maturing and innovating much too slowly compared to cloud because there isn't enough money in the Big Data industry, and political mistakes fractured the open source community and wasted the valuable pool of engineering talent on multiple redundant components for many years - to make matters worse the Cloud vendors are stealing open source and then fixing it up, undercutting all the open source / open-core companies like Cloudera, Confluent, Elastic.co etc. It feels like Open Source vendors have no future - you would get paid more outside the company - the "privilege" of working for these silicon valley startups is apparently worth earning less (hard to tell that to the bank when you need a high mortgage though) - many guys in knew California can't afford property in the same town as they work - they are essentially "working poor" (don't move to California)
