alt Hacker News>"The sign shop, which is part of the New York City Department of Transportation, has a staff of 46 workers, including seven letterers who lay out signs by hand and a blacksmith who makes custom brackets to securely attach signs to traffic poles."
This is one of the things I truly love about NYC. Any other city would have outsourced this operation to some third world sweatshop or massive corporation. Instead you have a whole crew of local tenured high quality jobs with good benefits run by citizens of the city.
I know our very small city (60k ish) has a dedicated sign shop. A lot of small communities use local or regional sign shops. Prison labor creates a lot of signs too. I don't see these things being outsourced to developing countries though I imagine corps like YESCO do have a fair amount of city/county sign work. I haven't been in the sign game for a bit though.