I worked for companies at various sizes FAANG and non-FAANG in London and I would say what FAANG pays is much better than what most of the startups or other companies such as banks pay.

Base salaries are usually similar but RSU and other benefits make the real difference. For example, most of the tech companies in London don't even provide health insurance, since they rely on NHS.

Startups try to use options to convince people but what you're given mostly wouldn't make you a millionaire in the event of exit or IPO.

I guess the other group of companies who could match what FAANG offers as a whole package would be hedge funds. I would say it's harder to enter them tho, since they still can throw your CV to the bin just because you don't have a degree from oxbridge.

Maybe it's a cultural thing - but as a British person I'd be fine with the NHS.

I'd be happy if they stopped the salaries being like 2-3x smaller than the USA though - I get it, the CoL is lower, but it's not that much lower.

I agree with CoL being not much different and companies just using that as a reason are misleading. It’s quite unfortunate that, if you’re a SR SWE in a normal company max you can make is 100k and that would translate into ~5500 net. If you have 2 kids and wanna rent big enough house near an outstanding school in zone 2, ok crime rate, with council tax and bills it’s quite possible to spend at 3500 of that just for housing. Not leaving much money for non-essential fun things.

Another reason for crazy salaries in the valley is limited talent pool, which might change soon with companies moving to remote or at least being remote friendly. It’s quite hard to get someone into the US with H1B. As far as I know even Facebook and Google stopped sponsoring.

I’m an American so I always thought it’s cool you have NHS because we have to either pay for our own health insurance or we get it from our employer. What do you mean by health insurance there - are those additional offerings that NHS doesn’t provide?

Yeah, usually allows you to jump the queue for ops and to get a private room. Access specialists you may not have got referred to by NHS. See [1] for full list.

For example a friend of mine had a gallbladder removed on private last month but would have had to wait till middle of next year in NHS.

Not usually that bad, but covid means a lot of NHS hospitals are having to push back non-essential surgery.

[1] https://uk.virginmoney.com/virgin/living/article/is-private-...

Thanks for the reply, appreciate the insight.

Is TerarkDB used as store engine for MySQL like FB does?

That glue layer is called MyRocks (MySQL -> MyRocks -> RocksDB). It may be possible to slot this in to replace RocksDB in that stack. (I don't know.)

Hello Roberto, if you don't mind me asking I have 2 questions for you.

1) According to Instagram's guideline for developers, your app can't have words like "insta" or "gram" in it, how did you pass this if you are using an actual application in Instagram?

2) As far as I can see from the API documentation there is no way of posting your pictures to Instagram directly via API. Does your application send push notifications when time comes and give ability to create a post in Instagram by one click in the app or do you ask for username / password and login to the app and do what needs to be done?

Hello there, I'm happy to answer.

1-I'm not using instagram's API, those limitations do not apply to Statimgram.

2-Idem before. We save (encrypted) username and password. We don't send "reminders" like hootsuite or other solutions, we post directly into IG.

Here's a small (this is 5 months old, the new UI looks much better!) demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mGwV6lBi8Us

Thanks for the answer. I don't want to discourage you for your project, but this action is stricly forbidden on Instagram's Terms of Service (https://help.instagram.com/478745558852511 Item 10)

Using this to sort out your own problem would probably fine as they will not notice it, but selling this as paid service might cause some trouble for you with Instagram Legal and also at the same time if you keep using same IP Instagram will probably block your APi after some time when they sense the usage.

Just a friendly notice for the things you might face in near feature :)

I really appreciate your concern. I said we weren't using IG's API, but I never said we were using their private API either ;-)

i admire your boldness but this is probably going to be a dead project soon. Maybe make a quick buck while you can?

Edit: because reverse engineering their api is also against their guidelines. Just because you don't use their official api, doesn't mean you don't have to adhere to their rules.