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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

#731

Post by returningfory2 »

dowager_dan99 wrote: post #642
returningfory2 wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No it's not.

Just open this (gift) article: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/01/09/opinion/immig...

There was clearly a non-trivial amount of frontend development work necessary to build the dynamic visualization in this article. This has nothing to do with CMS's. The work has nothing to do with persisting data anywhere. It has nothing to do with backend anything. It's all frontend work to get a visualization in a browser. Absolutely nothing do with CMS's.

Re: New York Times Tech Guild goes on strike

#732

Post by School-Cotton »

trinsic2 wrote: post #727
kccqzy wrote: post #608

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Requiring management to document these decisions is already itself placing low trust in management. I do not want to work at any workplace where trust in management is so low that low performance needs to be documented with a paper trail. I'd rather work at a workplace where the management is consistently competent and people place high trust in the management; so that when management fires someone everyone else agre…

I'm genuinely curious, are there any employees that work with a company that has good managers? I have heard so many bad stories of poisonous corporate culture its hard for me to see how there would be good managers. I haven't worked as an employee since the early 2000's.

Nearly all the managers I’ve had throughout my career have been good. Of course people in a bad situation are more likely to complain about it, so the impression you might get from reading a forum like this is heavily biased.

Re: New York Times Tech Guild goes on strike

#733

Post by marricks »

notatoad wrote: post #698
marricks wrote: post #597

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Striking during election week is kind of a crappy move to pull NYTimes has dragged out the negotiations for months, refusing to have a contract. It's kinda a make or break time for the union. When would be better to strike, what time would NYTimes and the audience prefer? It should be during a choke point otherwise management wouldn't listen. Additionally, this is a high traffic time, but not really a high stakes t…

>When would be better to strike i think the point the parent is making is that a better time to strike would be when they have specific demands that management is able to meet - to get them to the negotiating table, or to get them to sign a contract. but in the case where management is already at the negotiating table, and there's no contract to be signed, it's not clear what short-term goal a strike is meant to achi…

> when they have specific demands that management is able to meet

It's just wild how management is able to unilaterally decide what is and isn't reasonable, and just label unions as childish.

"We want to help you, but you're hurting us!" is one small step away from "gosh we love the idea of unions but it causes too much friction between workers and management, and trust me, management knows best."

Re: New York Times Tech Guild goes on strike

#734

Post by simplyluke »

ppeetteerr wrote: post #663
jjcm wrote: post #609

For reference, here's a current job opening for NYT's tech org for a senior software developer: https://boards.greenhouse.io/thenewyorktimes/jobs/4472655005 Salary is 140-155k USD. For reference, here's levels.fyi's breakdown of the New York city area: https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/new-yor... Median total comp is 185k. It seems like their total comp for NYT is slightly above the mark based on r…

Thank you for surfacing this. A senior role in NYC for 155K (plus bonus, which they do offer) is nothing when you factor in the cost of living.

Read both links. 155 is just salary, TC seems to be on the order of $200k for a senior, which is above-median but not top of market for NYC.

Re: New York Times Tech Guild goes on strike

#735

Post by slt2021 »

crazygringo wrote: post #371
dbalatero wrote: post #63

Here is context on the strike, how long it's been brewing, and more that I happened to read yesterday: https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/the-new-york-times...

Thank you so much! That is a vastly more informative article. It seems like it's not so much the NYT is opposed to the contract's specifics -- they're opposed to having a contract at all because the union is new. The NYT has been stringing the union along without ever actually signing anything, so now the union has to strike to get the NYT to take them seriously. Key parts: > The Tech Guild won its unionization vote…

>>According to the study, Black tech workers at the newspaper make 26 percent less than white workers

>>women, who make up over 40 percent of the Tech Guild, earn 12 percent less on average than men

claims like these always irk me, like did you just compare averages by race/gender? Whoever made this claim, did they control for other factors, like job title/level or productivity?

its like the famous "gender pay gap" claimed by all the people who majored in Gender Studies instead of Statistics. Turns out "gender pay gap" magically disappears as soon as you start controlling for relevant variables like hours worked, job seniority, experience, etc (https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/there-really-is-no-gender-wag...)

   That is, there is almost no evidence that men and women working in the same position with the same background, education and qualifications are paid differently. Whether it’s the Target Corporation, Facebook, the University of Virginia, the United Way, the White House or McDonald’s, there is almost no evidence that any of those organizations have two pay scales: one for men (at a higher wage) and one for women (at a lower wage). Of course, that would be illegal, and if that practice existed, organizations would be exposed to legal action and “half the legal profession would be taking such cases on contingency fees”
I am all for fairness in pay and equality, but lets not insult the intelligence of your readers by making some absurd claims without doing proper econometric study and controlling for confound variables

Re: New York Times Tech Guild goes on strike

#736

Post by inhumantsar »

WalterBright wrote: post #692
pc86 wrote: post #646

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

I read a statistic some years ago that public school teachers have the lowest rate of firing of any profession. The union has been successful in instituting a "process" for firing a teacher that is so onerous, time consuming, and complicated that it never happens. The only way a teacher can get fired these days is for showing up drunk or high, or having relations with a student. (And yes, in spite of this, there are…

> showing up drunk or high, or having relations with a student

having worked in a school district and staying in touch with colleagues afterward, I can honestly say that most people would be surprised at the number of teachers aren't fired for misconduct like that, particularly showing up drunk or high.

it seems that getting shuffled into an administrative role or a year of paid leave are the goto solutions whenever an incident can be handled quietly.

back in my grade school days, there was one teacher who would routinely lose her shit and scream at people.

when it inevitably escalated beyond that (usually throwing objects.. chalkboard erasers, garbage cans, even the occasional chair), she would simply end up teaching at a different school in the same district.

they managed to keep that game going for over twenty years.

Re: New York Times Tech Guild goes on strike

#738

Post by wormlord »

jjcm wrote: post #609

For reference, here's a current job opening for NYT's tech org for a senior software developer: https://boards.greenhouse.io/thenewyorktimes/jobs/4472655005 Salary is 140-155k USD. For reference, here's levels.fyi's breakdown of the New York city area: https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/new-yor... Median total comp is 185k. It seems like their total comp for NYT is slightly above the mark based on r…

In NYC?? Amazon entry level devs in LCOL areas were making that much in base alone in 2021.

Re: New York Times Tech Guild goes on strike

#739

Post by mrguyorama »

caesil wrote: post #330
infecto wrote: post #45

Just cause feels like a stretch. Is that common in a lot of employment contracts? Feels like one of those rules that sounds like it could make sense but in reality it does not play out and you get this weird cohort of unproductive employees that you can never get rid of.

Seems like it could drive NYT engineering to be much more conservative in hiring, resulting in engineers being pushed to do more work.

Which is why Europe has more time off, more benefits, happier employees, etc right?

Re: New York Times Tech Guild goes on strike

#740

Post by randomdata »

keybored wrote: post #332
vijucat wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Genuine question: what prevents the NYT from offshoring these jobs if they can be done from home? I feel for you, as a fellow worker, but unless there is something hyper-local about the job such as regulatory requirements or trust issues with IP protection, the jobs will go to the ones who work hard without complaining too much.

There are already places with Internet access that can work for cheaper than people that live in the NY area. For a long time now. Clearly there are more variables at play here. Or else the local NYT employees could be the most subservient and diligent workers ever: they would still get replaced by the cheaper offshore labor eventually. What prevents the NYT? In part: workers not just lying down and taking it. Just n…

> There are already places with Internet access that can work for cheaper than people that live in the NY area.

Hell, even in the NY area. Median household in the Bronx is only $37,397, meaning that half of the households are living there for less than that. And that's household income, which is usually about 1.5-2x above individual income. That's a huge margin against what these workers are being paid.

But people don't sell things based on cost. Hell, a lot of people lose money when they sell things. Around 10% of the US population have a negative income in a given year! People instead charge as much as they can (or think they can, at least) get.

And anyone who is worth hiring offshore can get just as much as a local (within some reasonable margin; there can be frictional costs to offshore hiring that won't change the cost to the employer, but will reduce what makes it to the worker). You can sometimes get lucky and hire someone who doesn't understand their worth, both locally and offshore, but you can't count on that (and they aren't apt to stick around for long once they realize their worth). On balance, it costs the same no matter where you go.

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