I’m native speaker and I thought they were the same. Still unsure of the difference. I guess I need to study this.

I think they reversed the 2 expressions. You should use “WHERE UPPER(name) = ‘ABC’” if you want to use the index.

I do think this could be true. Your productivity is way more visible in a small company, execs actually know what you’re working on maybe from day-to-day and most definitely week-to-week. Slackers don’t last long and mediocre developers standout, now why they might be perceived as mediocre is another discussion. My first job was at a big corporation (~150,000 employees) and honestly I saw so much politics and fiefdoms and just generally low quality developers not doing much but they could sneak under the radar because they’re a small cog in the apparatus. My next company (~50-60 employees) the devs were definitely better and way more productive, but it also felt very performative/showy environment of what devs did every what and if you were perceived as not doing enough you definitely stood out. It was a very public, perhaps stressful, work environment with demos every 2 weeks.

That seems like a fantastic salary, I’ve never gotten close to that.

I was laid off at a small tech company mid July and found another job with a friend at another small company in mid September. I thought maybe I wouldn’t find another job for a while, but it took me about 2 months with a very significant (40%) pay cut. I like the company pretty well, but I’m still hoping for something more. We’ll see.

Won’t people be willing when the cost of living goes up so much and all the tech jobs are gone to foreign labor that they have to work factory jobs?

I work at a company that has several micro services and a backend all in one monorepo. For some anecdata.

There are those “Awesome *” lists, such as “Awesome Python” or “Awesome Selfhosted”. Those are nice curated lists of repos on GitHub.