For our use case, we found the best approach was to clone all of the data to a temporary table with indices and constraints disabled, perform the updates, re-enable indices and constraints, and then replace the production table with the temporary table. This only works if you are able to update your data in bulk, and if some lag time in your updates is OK. This also has the benefit of never locking your production table.
In situations where real-time updates are important, the key is to minimize your indices as much as possible. Read up on heap only tuples (HOT). If that all isn't enough, maybe consider sharding your database.
Never run VACUUM FULL; it locks too aggressively. Let autovacuum do the job.
My first thought after reading the headline was that they had been placed under some kind of litigation hold and had to immediately back up all of their data on US customers to comply.
Just baseless speculation; I dont work for Facebook or have an inside source.
Environment variables are the best way to handle feature flags. The 12 factor app provides some guidance for doing it the right way. [0]
Feature flags do introduce complexity, but that can be partially mitigated by having good defaults and deleting flags once they're no longer needed. Even without that, as long as there are good defaults, you won't run into any problems until you have hundreds of flags.
I once worked on a system with tens of thousands of configuration flags that could all be overridden in an inheritance-esque chaining scheme, like Server A inherits regional config Foo which inherits from business unit config Bar, which inherits from three other 5000 line properties files. And naturally, almost none of these properties had defaults, so starting from scratch with a new configuration was impossible, leading to snowballing technical debt from copy pasting old configs. shudders
How does one find these high paying full time remote jobs? Most that I see with salaries listed on weworkremotely, Stack Overflow Jobs and the like top out around $150k.
There are lots of non-remote jobs that pay higher than my current salary, but I don't see that many remote jobs in the $180k to $200k range.
>(though maybe if marijuana becomes legal nationwide that will no longer be part of the test)
The test isn't going anywhere until there's a reliable field sobriety for weed. Companies don't want employees operating heavy equipment stoned, and unfortunately there's no way to test that somebody smoked in the last day or two, only that they've smoked in the last X weeks/months, depending on their habits.
> unfortunately there's no way to test that somebody smoked in the last day or two, only that they've smoked in the last X weeks/months, depending on their habits.
no non-invasive ones, anyways. :(
blood test does fine for checking whether you're high at the time of draw.
It's code that provisions or configures VMs, containers, cloud resources like RDS, etc. Usually this is accomplished using tools like Terraform, Ansible playbooks, SaltStack, Kubernetes, and the many other similar tools.
Are there a lot of American expat software engineers in the UK? For most people, it would be a steep pay cut to move from the US to anywhere in the EU.
There are some especially in the city finance and some engineering firms do pay six figures for non managerial engineering talent and while the pound has dropped it’s still possible to get a $130-150k base salary in the city and unlike the US you get a very good pension and benefits on top of that.
But if you compare the averages then yes you’ll be lucky breaking $70K in the EU.
I work for a US organisation in London, and not finance.
The average compensation for engineers is about £100,000 - some above and some below. This is on top of private medical and dental, generous pension contributions and a number of other benefits.
Same for us, finance has slightly above average comp packages especially the bonus but in London it’s possible to get to 100K as an engineer outside of it it begins to drop drastically some tech hubs can have high salaries but Manchester for example tops out at around 80K and that’s also pretty hard to get.
Outside of the UK you might be lucky to get €50-60K even when working for US firms on average this includes Germany.
Some Nordic countries have higher salaries but the CoL is pretty steep.
Overall if you don’t include taxes it’s possible to get competitive salaries in the UK and some parts of Europe once you take into account income tax and VAT you’ll the race isn’t nearly as close anymore.
Also startups do not pay well at all and equity is nearly unheard off even for single digit non-founder employees.
Seriously here in Norway getting over 100K € annually is becoming normal. If you are really talented, then you can even make 150k € annually. Freelancers make over 200k € annually. There is a huge shortage for developers these days, much thanks to "digital transformation" trend.
According to SSB, the 75th percentile for full-time system architects in private industry (the highest paid software developer category) in Norway in 2017 was $103K/year. This is close to the 50th percentile for all software engineers in US in 2017, which was $104K according to BLS. The 50th percentile for system architects in Norway was $87K.
Norway has a higher cost of living due to the 25% VAT, and because the national (non-developer) median salary is so high. Not to mention vehicle and gasoline taxes.
The thing with US salaries is that they're only higher in small circumstances, often what you'll find is someone is earning 100k USD and has an offer for 35-40k GBP will end up living a similar quality life. It sounds like it would be but that's not actually a pay cut. It comes from the fact that a lot of taxes are already given to the UK Govt, along with some strong protections for things like: private pensions, which doesn't happen in the US.
If you are very clever with applying taxes, and you don't pay into a private pension then you might be better off- but it's a good thought exercise to apply the costs of living differences and then work out what level of flexible income you have left, and then what buying power you have with that money.
The quality of life is generally comparable for jobs which technically pay 2x a UK salary in the USA.
Not so much at the high end (dev/engineer), though. Those $150k US salaries are also going to include generous health plans with little cost to the employee at most employers.
Having long term health problems is highly correlated with not being able to work, though, and losing insurance coverage. This is one of the things that surprises many people who think they're well covered with insurance, and then become ill, and it's one of the most insane things about our system of bundling work and health insurance.
> earning 100k USD and has an offer for 35-40k GBP will end up living a similar quality life.
That doesn’t sound right - $100k USD for a good software engineer is about right for second tier US cities where rent, taxes, and food are lower than in England.
Taxes really don’t vary much by city in the UK but rent can be considerably lower. London has the highest house prices but is not on par with NYC or SF; both of which being _considerably_ higher.
Rent is also much lower for the people making 100k salaries sheepmullet mentioned. In NYC, SF, or Seattle, pay will be a lot higher. New grad offers alone are 150k/year these days in big tech.
>For most people, it would be a steep pay cut to move from the US to anywhere in the EU.
You get bit at both ends - you had to pay for an American college degree ($$$) and had none of the social services like unemployment benefits/worker protections someone in the EU gets... then when you finally are making a high wage, you're going to get taxed to high heaven to pay for services you had to pay for (like the expensive degree I just mentioned).
Sadly, the best move looks to be to be frugal in the USA then retire early elsewhere.
A general point: it's important to adjust one's interpretation of salary by factoring in things like cost of living. Software engineers in New York and San Francisco make more money on average than those in other parts of the world, but it's very expensive to live, especially at a respectable standard of living, in both of these cities, dramatically offsetting the jump in salary. London is, of course, also very expensive, so I imagine my comment may not be quite as relevant.
There is lots of truth to this, but it's not that hard to save up for 6 to 24 months of expenses on an engineer's salary, assuming you are living within your means. Dependents complicate the situation, but don't make it impossible.
Saving 6 to 24 months of expenses is not hard (just time consuming), but risking a life's savings for one shot at business success is not a risk most people have the luxury of taking.
I can't risk my savings on a startup, because running out of savings means homelessness and hunger. Even without dependents, many people don't have parents willing or in a position to be the guarantor of such an investment.
You now have a gap of unemployment. How does your next employer see that? I know a common tactic in IT is that you're a "consultant" when unemployed. Hiring managers see through that readily.
So what then? You have a failed business, unemployed, and take a pay cut on your next job... all for the hopes that you might, just might strike it rich?
Again, this situation doesn't apply for those with well monied family and significant connections.
It's not a gap, you were starting a business. That is really hard and provides a lot of valuable experience along the way. Maybe just be honest about what you were doing?
In my experience using AWS, you can spin up new autoscaled instances pretty quickly. I don't even have a custom AMI, I use a generic image and run startup scripts to kick off my server software. Takes < 3 minutes to spin up a new one and start accepting requests.
If that's not fast enough, you can bake an AMI and scale more proactively (e.g. scale when your server is 70% utilized rather than 95%)
In situations where real-time updates are important, the key is to minimize your indices as much as possible. Read up on heap only tuples (HOT). If that all isn't enough, maybe consider sharding your database.
Never run VACUUM FULL; it locks too aggressively. Let autovacuum do the job.