I'd agree with most of his points, but he has conflated mapreduce, yarn and hdfs into "hadoop". the "assembly language" stuff is only accurate if you're writin

I'd agree with most of his points, but he has conflated mapreduce, yarn and hdfs into "hadoop". the "assembly language" stuff is only accurate if you're writing raw mapreduce jobs, but he's ignored projects like hbase, hive, pig, impala and cascading. the HA issues with the namenode have mostly gone away with CDH4.1. the one thing that's a complete pain is the lack of snapshotting functionality in hdfs, making consistent backups nearly impossible. the APIs for hdfs and yarn are poorly designed and pretty buggy, they're very obtuse and hard to debug. if you manage to find any documentation it's almost certainly wrong for the version you're using. nine times out of ten it's quicker to step into the source code rather than digging into the documentation. however once you've abstracted away the poor APIs it does work very well, and the pay is good...