📰 Dev.to · DataDriven

Junior DE postings collapsed 67%. Only 3% of jobs are entry-level. Hiring is up , but every gain went to senior roles. The on-ramp closed.

Companies finally dropped algorithm rounds. What came next: no rubrics, AI bans, 15-hour take-homes, and zero data modeling. Meet the new broken.

The take-home assignment replaced the whiteboard and somehow made data engineering interviews worse. Here's what's actually happening.

Career pages show a $185K median. Salary surveys say $128K. The $55K gap matters for every offer you negotiate this year.

48% of candidates are cheating technical interviews with invisible AI overlays. Screen share doesn't catch it. Here's what's actually happening.

Entry-level DE roles fell 67%. Nearly half of tech postings are ghost jobs. DE hiring is 'up 23%.' All three are true. Here's how that's possible.

A real 2026 DE job required SQL, Spark, Kafka, Flink, dbt, Terraform, K8s, and LLM skills. Three staff engineers reviewed it. Zero qualified.

52K tech cuts in Q1, 56% citing AI. But DE hiring is up 23% YoY. Here's what's getting cut and what's replacing it.

Most DE candidates grind the wrong LeetCode problems. Here is what actual interview loops test in SQL, Python, and system design in 2026.

Companies quietly killed LeetCode rounds for DE roles , but what replaced them is inconsistent, unpredictable, and harder to prep for than algorithms ever were.

Glassdoor, Indeed, and PayScale disagree by $120K. Here's why every source is broken , and what your number should actually be.

Take-homes grew from 4 hours to 20. No pay, no feedback, AI banned with no rubric updates. The DE interview is now just unpaid consulting.

12 real pipeline architecture interview questions with answers: batch vs streaming, idempotency, backfills, DAGs, schema evolution, and monitoring.

I've watched candidates with 8 years of experience go blank when asked to define the grain of a fact...

12 real Spark interview problems on shuffle, skew, caching, AQE, window functions, and OOM debugging, with detailed answers.

Twelve real SQL interview problems covering window functions, joins, deduplication, and gaps. Each includes a full answer and explanation.

12 real Python coding problems that appear in DE interviews, each with a clean solution and a plain-English explanation of why it works.

Companies ban AI in interviews. Candidates ignore the ban. Nobody can detect it. Here's what that means if you're job hunting right now.

Take-homes ballooned from 3 hours to 20. Companies get a free pipeline build. You get a rejection. Here's how to spot it and push back.

While the tech industry hemorrhages jobs, data engineering demand is surging. Here's exactly why, and which skills put you on the right side of the split.

Companies are quietly dropping algorithmic rounds , and replacing them with nothing coherent. Here's the chaos data engineers are navigating in 2026.

52K+ tech cuts in Q1 2026, junior DE roles hit hardest. AI is doing entry-level work now. Here's the brutal split , and how to land on the right side.

Google L4 hits $307K. Generalists can't get callbacks. The 2026 DE salary gap is widening fast , and most engineers don't know which side they're on.

Most interview prep teaches you what to know. Not how to think. That's a problem, because data...