This and also poor zoning laws and NIMBYism allow for (and encourage) constant sprawl which also drives city prices up more because some people don't want to commute two hours each way.
That too, but also combined with having to balance that the people who did this before also did it in a different time with different resources and also have selective memories.
This. Data engineering has ramped up significantly and if you want senior people you'll quickly run out of people who've been exclusively doing "big data" for 5+ years.
So your options are either senior software engineers who have done some data work (that's how I got to be a Data Engineer) or people who've been doing analytical data work (either in the traditional warehousing space or via science/insurance/finance type spaces) that are semi-technical but have no formal engineering background.
The former are people who went to college in the late 90s/early 2000s (like myself) when things were different. The latter need to hyperfocus on coming up to speed in engineering.
I reviewed this guide a couple months ago for my employer to consider as the basis of an internal bootcamp, and I'd note that it's perfect for the audiences I mentioned. Also, even for people with more up to date academic experience, note that the transactional database schemas that software normally deals with often look wildly different than analytical structures.
This! Ten times this! Single dependencies like this are absolutely a risk management issue.
I say this as someone who's both been a single point of failure at times (and learned my lesson) and someone who's had to clean up after piles of "clever" code that someone left behind when they got hired out somewhere else.
This one is a double whammy not only because there's not only data on those companies, but it can be extrapolated that many of those companies are relatively new to the cloud (and possibly which cloud service is available as well), making them also ripe for targeting.
One of Attunity's bigger sales deals is making their data migration tools free for a long period to help organizations migrate to cloud. This is essentially a list of "Hey, these other orgs might also be open to hacking as they haven't learned yet."
This! So much this! Can we please put away the Puritan bullshit ethics in the US that clearly keep getting exported? Those people were booted out a few centuries ago for a reason.
Those "hard workers" that are successful usually had serious connections, money, and luck to start with. Most actual hard workers end up poor and ignored.