every job posting: kafka required, flink preferred, streaming at scale. every company I talk to in interviews: yeah we batch every 15 minutes and call it near-real-time. which one is real
adtech and fintech are genuinely doing it. most SaaS analytics is 15-minute micro-batch with a kafka logo on it
every kafka 'required' job i've worked at: it was a queue between two services and nothing more
real streaming is rarer than job postings make it seem. fintech fraud, ad attribution, live inventory - that's where it actually shows up. most kafka is just a message queue that someone called a streaming platform