olds

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.

[1] https://medium.com/pinterest-engineering/driving-user-growth...

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

-

Are all the positions remote compatible? It's unclear from the jobs page. Thanks.

300-500K? for a house in Silicon Valley? With a Pool?

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.