Databricks counts being laid off as “red flag”

Well, not really, it just means that grounds for rejection come from inadequacies between the applicants and the role, not because of the recruiter’s prejudice. I know how the law works in the US, that was more or less the point. The fact that it works like that in one country or several does not mean that it is just, moral, or natural. Non-discrimination should be the default state. It’s like a legal system where you would need freedoms to be explicitly granted, which is counter to our common definition of liberty (along the lines of “rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others”). By narrowing down the definition of illegal discrimination, one gives more power to the people who are already in a position of power and so one keep pushing the status quo away from equal rights.

This is the language in the universal declaration of human right: “everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status”. This is not US law, but the fact that this was written and accepted by the vast majority of the countries on earth at least indicates that we (including nominally the US government) tend to hold that discrimination itself is morally wrong, regardless of whether the reason was put on a list or not. So it is not an unimaginable concept.

The problem is that 'discrimination' is exactly what you're trying to do in sifting job applicants, for example. Not unduly prejudiced discrimination, but you need to discriminate somehow.

I'm not all that familiar with US law fwiw, but I understand there's a concept of 'protected characteristics' very similar to here in the UK & EU countries. I don't really see that there's any other way of doing it - you have to use something - if you're not allowed anything then you can only pick randomly. (You may as well take the first applicant, except maybe that's not allowed either because it discriminates against slower applicants.)

> I did very well

This is the author's perspective and it's not necessary true. There's a tricky part in hiring process on the employer side, and it is enormously high cost of false positive. If I hire a wrong person, company should spend a tremendous trove of resources before the mistake could be corrected. Thus it is intuitive to just put a "no hire" resolution in case of any doubt.

If you have financial obligations, sometimes you have to take the job that's available.

it's simple: Many companies are on Azure for some reason. (mainly because of preexisting microsoft contracts, and because its so tightly coupled with office that if you want office at the enterprise level, you always need a little of Azure)

Now, those companies need data infrastructure. Azure ML studio is horrible. Azure data factory is somewhat okay'ish, but far from ideal. Azure Synapse is a steaming pile of junk that doesn't seem to improve. Azure data lake is kinda functional as a data lake, but lacks any decent ways to analyze that data.

Spinning up jupyter notebooks is not something most IT teams understand, they want a managed service.

As far as I know, Databricks is then the only solution offered by Microsoft. That's why they get such a high adoption rate. Not because of merit, but because they are the only somewhat acceptable solution on Azure. Good enough to just work. Not good enough to gain a competitive data advantage.

I hate what the world has come to, but sadly IT procurement has too much influence and CTO's dont understand the modern world enough. They just care about the big Microsoft contract, because it makes them look good (look at all these savings!)

If Microsoft would showcase Teradata or Dataiku or a bit of Snowflake, all of those run through the azure marketplace anyway,... we would be better off. But consultants and premium partners naturally only care about Databricks