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New York Times Tech Guild goes on strike

washingtonpost.com

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Re: New York Times Tech Guild goes on strike

#411

Post by visarga »

bwestergard wrote: post #3

I am also a member of the union at NPR, on the subway headed to the picket line in solidarity right now. Happy to answer any questions. I encourage everyone to respect the picket line and get your news elsewhere until the workers get a deal. The Times Workers are holding the line against arbitrary return to office mandates and for Just Cause protections. The vast majority of HN consists of developers, designers, QA,…

I have been avoiding NYT ever since they started suing LLM developers for copyright infringement. I find it distasteful to own abstract ideas or claim copyright over them.

Re: New York Times Tech Guild goes on strike

#412

Post by immibis »

nailer wrote: post #17
immibis wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

You can easily compare the civilian/combatant death ratio in the Israel / Hamas conflict to any other recent war, or alternatively look at the population growth of Gaza since Israel has left, to confirm this is false. NYT also covered the fake hospital story and had to apologise regarding it: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2023/10/new-york-times-gaza-...

> You can easily compare the civilian/combatant death ratio in the Israel / Hamas conflict to any other recent war, or alternatively look at the population growth of Gaza since Israel has left, to confirm this is false.

I'm not understanding how the population of Gaza is supposed to disprove the fact that the NYT made up fake stories. Please enlighten me?

Re: New York Times Tech Guild goes on strike

#413

Post by diffeomorphism »

stickfigure wrote: post #342
legitster wrote: post #323

> The two sides negotiated until late Sunday. The sticking points in recent days were over whether they could get a “just cause” provision in their contract, which means workers can be terminated only for misconduct or another such reason; pay increases and pay equity; and return-to-office policies. This seems like a LOT of issues that still need to be hammered out. It would be one thing if they were disagreeing abou…

> workers can be terminated only for misconduct or another such reason This is such a weird request for technology workers. You want to work with low-performing coworkers?

That would be weird, so it is obviously not the case. That is because you are quoting only half of the (excerpt of the) point.

Re: New York Times Tech Guild goes on strike

#414

Post by drawkward »

lucianbr wrote: post #402
cool_dude85 wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Just cause" provisions are about an inch away from arbitrary termination, they are hardly "the other extreme."

That's really nice if that is the case. My understanding from the comments was that this prevents people who don't do their job from being fired, as long as they don't set fire to the servers or something. If I misunderstood, then the union is being nicer than they have to.

In my experience, the commenters here, on a forum for SV startups, are overwhelmingly biased in favor of business.

Re: New York Times Tech Guild goes on strike

#415

Post by runako »

xnx wrote: post #143
tsunamifury wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this comment made every time by hacker news people? “I run my basement website with in my spare time? Why can’t one of the most popular websites in the world run on gum and a few paper clips”

Fair question. Having not worked at an organization like the New York Times, I really don't know. 5 people would obviously be too few, and 2,000 people would be too many. Hacker News handles a huge amount of traffic to dynamic pages with basically zero (by comparison) technical maintenance. Twitter (though not doing well as a business) was overloaded with tech employees.

> Hacker News handles a huge amount of traffic to dynamic pages

Traffic is not the primary driver of staffing. For a simple app, it is relatively straightforward to use commodity cloud offerings to scale to large volumes of traffic. Even something as simple as Heroku + a CDN can take a small team a long way.

But the NYT is not a simple app. I'm not even willing to accept that their CMS needs could be handled with an off-the-shelf CMS without modification. Without having worked there, I can see:

- CMSs for text/images, audio, video content - syndication for audio content - custom? subscription system - some kind of interface to the printing system - bespoke game studio - Web dataviz studio

plus all the stuff needed to run a company as big as the NYT, which will include lots of integrations between things like payroll, accounting, 3P ad networks, reporting, HR software, etc.

I haven't even included the people who might make use of the copious data generated by the business.

These things add up fast.

> Twitter (though not doing well as a business)

That's a heck of a caveat! Most businesses aim to do well as businesses, so current Twitter is not a great model.

Re: New York Times Tech Guild goes on strike

#416

Post by DoneWithAllThat »

miltonlost wrote: post #272
mellosouls wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it's a reasonable offer, there is no clarity in the article about exactly what is so bad they need to strike. Eg if they said we haven't had a pay rise for ten years, that would provide context. Nothing in the article gives a justification for a strike. That's not to say the justification doesn't exist but it's not remotely elucidated.

You find it reasonable. THe union, and I, do not find a RTO announcement in June (or anytime really) to be a reasonable request. So yes, the article justified the strike. You just don't think the justification is reasonable.

You don’t think it’s reasonable to tell your employees that as a condition of employment they have to be at a specific location at specific times?

Re: New York Times Tech Guild goes on strike

#417

Post by bcdtttt »

stickfigure wrote: post #342
legitster wrote: post #323

> The two sides negotiated until late Sunday. The sticking points in recent days were over whether they could get a “just cause” provision in their contract, which means workers can be terminated only for misconduct or another such reason; pay increases and pay equity; and return-to-office policies. This seems like a LOT of issues that still need to be hammered out. It would be one thing if they were disagreeing abou…

> workers can be terminated only for misconduct or another such reason This is such a weird request for technology workers. You want to work with low-performing coworkers?

[dead]

Re: New York Times Tech Guild goes on strike

#419

Post by PittleyDunkin »

seizethecheese wrote: post #365
PittleyDunkin wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Striking during election week is kind of a crappy move to pull. It's smart. The one week where americans manage pull their head out of their ass is a good time to move.

Why not both smart and crappy?

TBH, i don't see the crappy angle at all. I think the country will be just fine without its favored boutique-news-coverage-election-needle-software. Besides, the actual coverage isn't being effected at all.

EDIT: spelling

Re: New York Times Tech Guild goes on strike

#420

Post by input_sh »

losvedir wrote: post #83
bwestergard wrote: post #3

I am also a member of the union at NPR, on the subway headed to the picket line in solidarity right now. Happy to answer any questions. I encourage everyone to respect the picket line and get your news elsewhere until the workers get a deal. The Times Workers are holding the line against arbitrary return to office mandates and for Just Cause protections. The vast majority of HN consists of developers, designers, QA,…

> I encourage everyone to respect the picket line and get your news elsewhere Technically, wouldn't "respecting the picket line" be not doing any "scab" work for the NYTimes? Asking us not to use the NYTimes is more of a boycott and a separate question (and not always something strikers ask for). Is it official policy of the strike that they request people boycott in solidarity as well?

What they're asking from readers is far more limited in scope than not using the whole website:

> The Tech Guild is asking readers to honor the digital picket line and not play popular NYT Games such as Wordle and Connections as well as not use the NYT Cooking app. Members of the newsroom union, Times Guild, have pledged not to do struck work, a right that’s protected under their contract.

https://nyguild.org/post/new-york-times-tech-guild-walks-off...

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