9 years ago I was working for a major broadcasting company in the arse end of London as a junior dev, building one of their Android apps.
We'd roll features out months before & enable them with feature flags via a json file we'd manually push to a prod server at a later date.
We'd just built a huge new feature letting you request content to be downloaded to your set top box remotely & it had a 250k marketing campaign to go along with the launch.
Senior dev trusted me with prod deployment rights.
I pushed the wrong json config to prod, launching the feature weeks before the marketing campaign.
Thank god I was a junior perm, that was definitely a firing offence.
I do. As a guy contracting for a FTSE 100 company now who've just had a buyout offer from the states, I'm surrounded by a bunch of execs that are incredibly happy (assuming it comes off)
Startups in London will offer shares for senior positions in much the same way as San Fran, normally with a vestment period, but it's not as common.
I'm not 100% on what the 3x rule is.
What I do know is that most of my contractor friends are on around £500 per day, which assuming a 260-workday year is 130k. There's a couple of oracle DBA's on around 800pd, which is 208k.
But then you have to administer a database & there's only so much I'd be prepared to do for money.
As a contractor, normal tax rules don't apply (and are normally much more beneficial). So a contractor earning 90k & a FTE earning 90k still results in the contractor coming out miles ahead in terms of raw income.
Obviously there's offsets to this. No sick pay, no paid leave, no free pension contributions etc.
As I found out today if you want the analytics data in CSV, or query it to any level that's useful beyond "We have 5 users in Stockholm on KitKat", you'll need the next service tier up, which is $25 per month per project.
But if you want basic analytics, then it's free & easy.