If there’s a theme at HBaseCon 2012 here in San Francisco, it’s that the big data sector is hiring. Even Apple is trawling conference attendees, looking for a Hadoop/HBase engineer to assist with Siri.

The conference organizers seem to have guessed this would happen, and provided ribbons for attendees to attach to their badges flagging things like whether they were new to HBase, seeking employment, or on the hunt for talent. And I have to say, I saw many, many “I’m hiring!” ribbons in my day at HBaseCon.

In fact, a job posting whiteboard at the conference had a few heavy hitters listed, like:

• StumbleUpon (No surprise as StumbleUpon software engineer Michael Stack actually chaired the HBaseCon 2012 program committee.)
• Cloud storage provider Box (neé Box.net)
• Riot Games, the developer behind the incredibly popular League Of Legends online game
• Cloudera, hosts of HBaseConf 2012, and a major evangelist for the big data movement.
• Klout, the social media reputation company, is doing some “pretty cool stuff” with HBase, or so its whiteboard posting says.
• Apple, seeking a Hadoop/HBase engineer for Siri – Apparently, as proven by a November 2011 job posting, the iPhone’s virtual assistant uses HBase as its database backend.

Big data faces a significant talent shortage as it is, and we may be a while before we know exactly how best to employ data scientists, let alone what makes for a good (or great) one. Hadoop is more or less a known quantity, but something I kept hearing today is that HBase has a long ways to go before it really arrives as a mature product – it’s ugly, hard to use and unstable. Couple those trends together, and there are still hurdles.

But hope springs eternal: Cloudera CEO Mike Olson says that much like a flood of funding sped up the evolution of the core Hadoop offering, the rising tide of green into the HBase segment is going to mature the database, sharpen proficiencies and generally bring the market along.

“It’s pretty Darwinian,” Olson told SiliconANGLE.