71–80 of 675 posts
Good for them. More workers need to be understanding just how much they are being exploited by their leadership and demand a more equitable piece of the pie.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The complexity of a massive org like the NYT is significantly non trivial. I think that is the point. At face value what they produce, simply should not be that complex. It seems it’s complex for the sake of being a big complex organization. And unions will only solidify that into stone to prevent any sort of optimization that would bring the complexity down.
Did you read the list of things I posted they have to do to ship their product? It's non trivial because those are hard problems and their space is large. It should be that complex because it is that complex.
But anyways much of what you are listing is just more stuff that sounds complex or is not needed. It exist because there was money and it was a big bloated organization. It’s not needed to run the core business and frankly the cost of those things are still small. The number of users don’t change their engineering cost, or at least should not.
The promise of software is exactly the return on investment is not affected by the number of people who use it.
Also. You got me at dynamic content, that is the job of the software, not a human. If they have yet to provide user friendly interfaces down their editors to manipulate the content on their site without the need to interface with an engineer then they have already failed.
I know this sounds like a rant, and maybe it is. But I am tried of poorly ran companies justifying outrageous team sizes because they simply ignore any good design with their software and how to organize a company to be lean agile and successful.
This could be a blueprint for how other tech departments unionize, but I suspect NYT is a unique case because of their politics. Can such a left wing cornerstone really afford to look anti-union inside their own house? This gives the workers more leverage than they would otherwise have in other companies. In any of the places I worked at in the past an anti-union consulting firm would have been called in to bust thin…
Their coverage is much more complicated than left vs right, but one theme is they don’t question the loudest narratives, and they hold grudges when they perceive someone to not give them enough access.
The right tends to be louder and more uniform and persistent in messaging, so that coloring often gets unconsciously added to articles rather than the journalists taking a step back and analyzing the whole picture.
It’s the quick/lazy way to write stories after all, and journalists have deadlines. The author may be left leaning and some of that may even show, but a little left leaning flavor doesn’t mask that it’s based on the right’s take.
The choice of coverage also is very herd like, not left or right.
The NYT also goes out of the way to appear fair and balanced, trying to find the “average” in stories. But as anyone but the NYT knows, averages are skewed easily.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What have you done to better understand the technical worker needs of the NYT?
Are you suggesting it's unreasonable to ask here without doing his own independent research? It seems like a reasonable thing to discuss here.
Observation: answering the question you wished you were asked as opposed to the one you were asked is a conversation dominating tactic which reduces your credibility towards good-faith socratic dialogue.
As someone who worked here seems odd they'd need a strike pretty good pay/benefits
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not transacting with a business in solidarity with an ongoing strike is a boycott. People can boycott the NYT in support of the strike. But crossing a picket line is a much, much bigger deal than not participating in a boycott. If you skip the NYT Mini Crossword for a week to support the strikers, I respect that, but I'm going to keep pushing for that sweet 15s finish this week and I'm going to sleep fine doing it.
I agree that a boycott is different, and for the NYT the terms are pretty distinct. But when employees are picketing a retail business, the two are much more entangled, so I think the common use of the phrase has shifted away from the precision you're expecting it to have.
In many cases (though not all!), when workers are striking against a retail business, they want the customers to keep coming. Showing the strain that gets put on the system in such cases can be part of the leverage the union exerts.
This is why we, on the outside, need to listen to what the union is asking of us, and not just loudly announce that we are boycotting in solidarity, or "refusing to cross the picket line", if that's the opposite of what they want.
As I understand it, the earliest they could actually strike would be 80 days from today, as per the Taft-Hartley act, putting the strike on November 29 (after the election). Something seems broken when a group is paid relatively fair wages ( https://www.levels.fyi/companies/the-new-york-times-company/... ), works 35 hours a week before overtime, and is talking about going on a strike. I don't think that fits with the…
Those wages are absolutely not fair in the era of modern tech comp. But IMHO people should just find a different job, there are plenty available that pay better.