Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47574126

Points: 4

# Comments: 0

Billboards are primarily focused on brand awareness since you can't update them frequently and you don't have amazing targeting/attribution data. They're also hyper-geographic specific. For tech companies that means that billboards are most useful when targeting either a specific conference or when targeting people that can make sales decisions.

Sf's billboard space is heavily used by the tech industry because A) you've got a high concentration of consumers for your tech product (developers, marketers, operations, product managers, etc) B) you've got a high concentration of decision-makers in terms of director/VP/execs/consultants going through that airport who may end up making a final decision on your sales. C) you've got a concentration of investors in terms of VC, private equity, angel investors. This helps bring in interest for that next round/acquisition. For your existing investors this means that they've got something to brag about. D) hometown pride. Companies tend to put billboards near where executives travel through since it's a reminder of the work that the marketer is doing. It also helps with hiring and media reputation.

If you compare SF to NYC or Boston, those other cities have a much smaller amount of their workforce in tech (22% compared to 11%). This is especially true if you think about the number of people transferring at these airports. The concentration of customers just isn't there, which is why NYC ads tend to be more consumer driven.

The reality is that we need data breaches to be painful but maybe not company ending events unless it really is sensitive data. As patio11 likes to say the right level of fraud is not zero. There's a middle ground where we can increase company liability or reduce the damage caused by a beach.

In NYC, it's 15/hr or 100/season. In the town I grew up in it's 20/yr for residents and 40/yr for non residents. I'm my current town it's free. And I suspect that there are waivers/discounts for folks that can't pay that amount.

- Is all your software supported on Linux? Are you sure? Do all the features work or are any missing/broken? Have you tested this or are you relying on Sales or docs that are likely wrong? What happens if one piece of software drops Linux support?

- Does using Linux block any future planned projects or make future projects much more complex?

- You now need to spend time with every new hire training folks on the new OS, as well as retraining existing staff.

- Are you going to piss off a lot of staff because you've made their life harder?

- For compliance/security requirements, do you have everything necessary to easily explain to auditors that these computers have the equivalent security (antivirus, monitoring, mdm all with metrics, dashboards and logs)?

Essentially this boils down to a lot of work, which impacts the future flexibility and the morale of the company in order to save a relatively small amount of money. Often times your spending more money on supporting Linux than you're actually saving.

ChromeOS is a modified version of this argument. ChromeOS comes with a strong security and compliance story, and has easy built in management. There's been some adoption in call centers but primarily it's used in schools by students because the school has been given a grant so gets them for free. Even with all that, very free businesses are adopting ChromeOS because a) some workflow they use isn't supported and b) Windows is not significantly more expensive.

A lot of the ceremonies in general are mostly helpful to the EM/PM. How many things that you're doing are actually improving how you get work done? Especially when you consider how much time is spent on these ceremonies (sprint planning 1 hr, sprint retro 1 hour, daily standup 15-30 minutes. Plus whatever prep is needed and the interruption time.) For many companies this is a 20% or more overhead that's mainly busywork because you still need the additional meetings to understand what you're working on.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41333450

Points: 4

# Comments: 0

In general, playbooks are useful for either common occurences that happen frequently (ie every week we need to run a script to fix something in the app) or things that happen rarely but when they do happen need a plan (ie disaster recovery)

So what can you do? 1. Update your LinkedIn with descriptions of all your jobs so it looks similar to your resume. This should include technologies you've worked with. This is basically doing some SEO work so you get inbound recruiter emails (understanding that the quality of those inbounds will vary dramatically). 2. Apply to jobs directly and actually write cover letters (take a look at Who's Hiring, etc).

In terms of new skills or certifications, it's usually easier to add something adjacent to what you already do instead of learning something completely new. If you're a backend engineer, maybe you learn about data pipelines, or cloud infrastructure. If you're a front-end engineer maybe learn to write some backend code using nodejs. Put a side project on your resume, and ideally online.