Hi Jon,
I was a PM on Growth at Pinterest many, many moons ago (~2013-2014?) so it was cool to see your post and read through your observations on Growth at Pinterest. A couple points I might add that might be of interest to your readers would be that the biggest changes can be technically driven, and the biggest changes are sometimes the smallest. I was at Pinterest from 2013 - 2017 and iirc the two biggest experiments in terms of percentage user signups and retention were the conversion of unauth pages to react [1] and the change from "Pin" to "Save". They were both roughly equal magnitude in impact (again, iirc), and completely outsized all other growth experiments shipped in those respective years. Two very different projects, approached from very different angles, that ultimately lead to a faster, and more understandable, product.
Not the OP, nor am I a bear on Lambda School, but I'll articulate the bear case.
Lambda School is just another source of talent/human capital to a company. And companies suddenly aren't hiring and probably won't be for a while. And if they aren't hiring, Lambda School can't place students. And if they can't place students, then there are no ISAs, which is how Lambda makes its money. It's a straightforward funnel that's about to have a ton of supply and less demand, with Lambda bearing the financial burden to train/education the people. On top of that, if you have a bunch of people taking all this time to be trained under the pretense of getting a pretty good paying job and now that's not going to happen, well you're not going to be too thrilled with Lambda School (rightly or wrongly). So you've got, potentially, a double whammy: less revenue and your best marketing channel (word of mouth) going south. Not great.
I know you're asking in jest, but here's an honest answer: Google Fiber. Google's DNS servers are ~15ms further away than a local ISP who runs public DNS servers as well (xmission). Part of this is because google fiber has a peering connection at SLIX (slix.net), and so does xmission, whereas Google's DNS servers appear to be in the bay area.
Whether or not it's noticeably faster, I'm not sure, but I've always used xmission's dns servers without fault for the past 10 years.
--- 8.8.8.8 ping statistics ---
4 packets transmitted, 4 packets received, 0.0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 17.763/18.264/18.803/0.425 ms
--- 198.60.22.2 ping statistics ---
4 packets transmitted, 4 packets received, 0.0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 2.906/3.457/3.871/0.408 ms
Response to your bullets with their corresponding number.
1- The story I am talking about was 5 years ago, at that time you could not select Kurdistan in hometown. it was the previous version of facebook profile (before they change it and it was like that for more than 10 years) we fought 10 years, hundreds thousands of pettitions. so your screenshot is Irrelevant.
The story of kurdish accounts being banned for having Kurdish flag is still true, specially during the massacare that happened in the city of Afrin Massacre just a few days ago.
2- I did not work at FB, FB reached out to me to hire me, I went there and I asked them the questions inside FB. I will NEVER ever work for FB. Crappy technologies, Crappy company, not inline with my values.
4- They invited me to W hotel in Chicago, I might still have the conversation in my LinkedIn, what are you trying to say ? are trying to imply I made this story up ? I believe the the recruiting team (including managers and developers) was visiting Chicago, and the job was not in Chicago.
and in the end you are suspecting my credibility, you can checkout my Github I am a public person, I am actually presenting K8Guard for Kuberentes for Linux Foundation in a few weeks. I can stand and testify for every claim I made.
The leaked document inside facebook was also verifies a lot of things I said. (the leaked document was very old not sure how many years ago 6-7 years ago maybe) that they clearly had examples of what flags to and what words to ban. including innocent kurdish flags.
We're open to people outside the US (and we have a few) but as mentioned we're looking for people with a high overlap with PST for easier collaboration.
I lived on Albrook AFB from 94-97 and my parents worked on Howard AFB. This is a fairly accurate portrayal of the Americans' attitude toward the Panamanians and their ability to manage the Canal. I remember even in the mid-late 90s, there was active talk of canceling the Treaty because Panama couldn't maintain the canal and the canal is an incredibly important part of the US Navy's projection of power across two oceans.
The Panama Canal was unique in the density of military bases across different branches. At the height of military presence in the Canal Zone there were ~20 different military bases along a 50 mile corridor near the canal. By the time we were there in the mid/late 90's there were around 5-7 bases left operational. It was interesting to see the defunct bases (mostly on the Atlantic side) and realize the sheer massive operation that existed to create and sustain this American colony.
[1] https://medium.com/pinterest-engineering/driving-user-growth...