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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

#641

Post by abletonlive »

kergonath wrote: post #563
abletonlive wrote: post #541

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly yes. I've been interviewing people that have gotten laid off and almost 75% of the time I'm thinking that they were probably chosen for layoffs due to low performance

> I've been interviewing people that have gotten laid off and almost 75% of the time I'm thinking that they were probably chosen for layoffs due to low performance The people interviewing with you might be a biased subset of those that were laid off. I don’t mean anything about your company, which could be great or terrible, I have no idea. But I would expect the best performers to get new positions quickly through t…

> The people interviewing with you might be a biased subset of those that were laid off.

I suspect this to be very likely the case but I don't think it changes anything here. If we laid off people that were high performers and they got taken up in the job market quickly that means things are still healthy and we are still giving jobs to people that deserve jobs. A net neutral effect on the system as a whole.

The stragglers that can't find new jobs because they were laid off for low performance AND also are low performing interviewers are not useful to the system. Now they just kind of eat up some interviewing productivity but thats probably a net-positive for the entire job market as a whole.

Re: New York Times Tech Guild goes on strike

#642

Post by dowager_dan99 »

returningfory2 wrote: post #127
xnx wrote: post #113

> more than 600 software developers Does anyone have a sense for how this breaks down? I would never have guessed so many full-time employees were necessary to maintain a CMS.

The NYT has awesome interactive web features for things like the election tomorrow, which I'm guessing take a lot of development work to land. It's much more than a CMS.

It's a very good CMS, with lots of cool, bespoke features you don't typically get, but functionally it is still mostly a CMS.

Re: New York Times Tech Guild goes on strike

#643

Post by petesergeant »

legitster wrote: post #611
39896880 wrote: post #581

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Striking during election week is kind of a crappy move to pull. Can we get a definitive list of weeks where workers’ rights are officially less important than $world_event? That way we can schedule our requests appropriately. We don’t want to inconvenience anyone.

I know you are trying to be flip, but there topics that are more important than worker's rights. I'm not going to argue that the NYTimes crossword is up there, but I think a good case can be made that independent journalism is up there, especially during open elections. There is a long list of organizations and governments that made worker's rights more important than inclusive democratic institutions, and it didn't…

There will be absolutely no shortage of other places where Americans get their election news, and arguably at a higher quality than NYT. I will miss their election ticker dashboard widget thing though, that thing is cool.

Re: New York Times Tech Guild goes on strike

#644

Post by farts_mckensy »

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…

> Striking during election week is kind of a crappy move to pull.

I love that the default ideology here is to side with the employer. I'm glad that when I am negotiating my salary with my employer, there are no comments from the Peanuts gallery.

Re: New York Times Tech Guild goes on strike

#646

Post by pc86 »

quandrum wrote: post #408
stickfigure wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

No, I want management to develop a system to determine who is low-performing, document when those workers don't meet the standards of performance, and reference those documents when they fire someone. It's just asking for due process.

It's not "just asking for due process." Everyone has interacted with a government office with an absolutely worthless employee who is just sitting around counting down the days to retirement where they can continue getting taxpayer money for doing nothing. Just because there's a process to get rid of someone doesn't mean it will ever happen.

This is a ploy to make it harder to fire bad programmers. If I have to try to hit a deadline and my coworker is garbage, I want my boss to be able to fire them and start finding a replacement, not start a six month process of paperwork, meetings, and HR CYA bullshit with the sole purpose of avoiding some bogus NLRB complaint.

Re: New York Times Tech Guild goes on strike

#647

Post by dowager_dan99 »

School-Cotton wrote: post #221
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”

The OP didn’t claim they thought 600 was unreasonable. A charitable reading of their post is they were genuinely curious why it’s reasonable.

"Charitable interpretation" it seems like that is what's missing from the internet (and world) today. Extreme perspectives and no interpersonal relationships == not trust, no willingness to learn.

Re: New York Times Tech Guild goes on strike

#648

Post by shmatt »

sega_sai wrote: post #605

Does it mean that there will be no election needle ? That would be disappointing.

everything is as usual, including the needle. I asked one of the guild leaders myself.

My big question is, how much % of their engineers are participating in this? I can't find a single clear answer. For all we know there are another 400 engineers not part of this activity

As far as I can tell this isn't a Boeing situation where a decision is made and all employees are part of it. the NYT building is still full of workers today

Re: New York Times Tech Guild goes on strike

#649

Post by dang »

39896880 wrote: post #581
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…

> Striking during election week is kind of a crappy move to pull. Can we get a definitive list of weeks where workers’ rights are officially less important than $world_event? That way we can schedule our requests appropriately. We don’t want to inconvenience anyone.

Please make your substantive points without snark. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

Re: New York Times Tech Guild goes on strike

#650

Post by ta1243 »

willsmith72 wrote: post #506
ta1243 wrote: post #474

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Problem is that require the employer to define what an acceptable level of performance is, and that's notoriously difficult So instead the choices tend to drift to "fire them on the manager's whim" or "practically impossible to get rid of short of murder"

Who says it's notoriously difficult? I've worked many places with clear processes for identifying and resolving poor performance issues (firing being one possible resolution). That sounds like just your experience

It's massively common, factors into the whole office/home debates that have been raging for 4 years

https://www.apqc.org/blog/better-measurement-knowledge-worke...

The crux of growth in knowledge workers is that our current norms of measurement and productivity were developed in a manufacturing or manual task-oriented mindset. According to Peter Drucker, productivity for knowledge workers needs a different set of considerations

https://www.cipd.org/globalassets/media/knowledge/knowledge-...

While in manual work the targets and outputs are usually clear, knowledge work and its results are less tangible, and therefore harder to define, measure and evaluate

https://trepo.tuni.fi/bitstream/handle/10024/114586/palvalin...

Drucker (1999) has even stated that knowledge worker productivity is the biggest challenge for modern work life. Other researchers have also discovered that the performance of an individual knowledge worker is the most important factor for organisational success... The need for general performance measurement is great as the theme is still quite new and there are very few previous studies measuring the effectiveness of NewWoW practices. There is also a need for practical tools for analysing and managing the performance of knowledge work from the NewWoW perspective. Organisations are still planning and making NewWoW changes, without clear evidence of their benefits and without any measurement information

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