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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

#761

Post by lxgr »

micromacrofoot wrote: post #757
lxgr wrote: post #719

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did he actually say that? Because in the article, there's only a tweet of him saying that Perplexity is "on standby to help", of which "offering to replace striking staff with AI" seems a pretty strong mischaracterization. Update: The headline (but not the URL) was just changed to "Perplexity CEO offers AI company’s services to replace striking NYT staff" (emphasis mine).

The full quote is > Hey AG Sulzberger @nytimes sorry to see this. Perplexity is on standby to help ensure your essential coverage is available to all through the election. DM me anytime here.” it's absolutely scab behavior

Sure, but why add "with AI"?

Re: New York Times Tech Guild goes on strike

#762

Post by mrguyorama »

conartist6 wrote: post #41
lolinder wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> was chosen to hurt me extremely badly if I should feel morally obligated to follow your advice A few sincere questions: 1. Are there no other news sources that you'd trust to convey the binary of 'who won the election?' 2. Assuming that there aren't, what negative effect would there be to you from not knowing the result of the election for a few days? I'm sorta hoping that "hurt me extremely badly" is an exaggerati…

That's assuming the result is a binary this year. I'm expecting torrents of news about this contest, which is likely to turn into a brawl.

If there is ANY political violence from this election, you should be checking LOCAL news, not the NYT, unless you plan to drive out to the Capital to participate in that violence.

What the shit does it help the Capital police if there is some sort of coup attempt and you watch it on TV? Does that really save America somehow? People are so desperate to be bystanders to things they could have prevented by making better choices months earlier.

Re: New York Times Tech Guild goes on strike

#763

Post by RHSeeger »

taurath wrote: post #664
bko wrote: post #447

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sounds good, but in my experience bad employees were known to everyone. It was difficult to pinpoint exactly why they were bad or toxic, but pretty much everyone agreed. If you gave them some benchmark they would need to hit (e.g. close tickets, be on call, etc), they would be able to do so. So creating a documentation trail is difficult, especially if its based on people saying they don't think he does good wor…

> To think that employers are just randomly firing people for no reason has never struck me as being even remotely true Have you only ever worked with reasonable management? The problem with quick to hire quick to fire is that eventually you might be quick to fire. I suspect you have a much higher level of security than most people to have quality of coworkers as a top priority!

Heck, there's companies where standard practice is "fire the lowest x% of workers on a regular basis". Doesn't even matter if they're doing a good job or not; just that someone else is doing a _better_ job.

Optimal strategy is to sabotage your coworkers in such an environment.

Re: New York Times Tech Guild goes on strike

#764

Post by sp527 »

bojo wrote: post #355
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. That sounds like an anti-union stance to me. There's no better time to strike than when your opponent can't afford to look bad.

What's wrong with being anti-union?

I'm extremely anti-union principally because they drive up costs to consumers while yielding a product or service of at best comparable (but usually degraded) quality. Some easy examples are UAW destroying Detroit automakers or the recent dockworkers strike involving uneducated laborers demanding compensation ludicrously in excess of what even most people with master's degrees make, all to drastically under-perform equivalent workers from almost anywhere else in the world. To top it off, those same dockworkers zealously guard access to those highly lucrative jobs with some very questionable tactics.

When you drive by a highway construction project that doesn't progress for years or, worse, a horde of workers, most of whom appear to be doing absolutely nothing, there's a good chance that's union fuckery. When you go to almost any hotel in NYC and are treated with borderline disdain by highly incompetent staff while paying $500+ a night, that's union fuckery. When you wonder why you can't get cheap sufficiently high quality EVs like those from China, that's union fuckery. I could go on.

Unions are not comprised of saints. They're doing the same thing as the companies they despise: getting theirs while fucking over everyone else.

Re: New York Times Tech Guild goes on strike

#766

Post by seabass-labrax »

lxgr wrote: post #750
seabass-labrax wrote: post #744

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ...to help ensure your essential coverage is available to all through the election. That sounds liking replacing striking staff to me, at least for the duration of the election. What other services of value except LLMs to write articles does Perplexity have to offer to the New York Times?

> That sounds liking replacing striking staff to me That's my read too, but they could also e.g. lend them some engineers, have them build an election dashboard for them etc. The fact that that would still be crossing the picket line, how realistic any of that is, or how genuine the offer, are all great questions/observations, but "replace with AI " seems like a quite dishonest editorialization in any case.

If editorialization is ever appropriate, this feels to me like the right time. Substantively, Perplexity make LLM tools - that's all they advertise on their website and what they are known for. Maybe they do have some jack-of-all-trade engineers who could turn their hands to web development or something, but there are also no doubt cleaners working at Perplexity. They aren't offering the New York Times help with the toilets!

Re: New York Times Tech Guild goes on strike

#767

Post by chasd00 »

You don’t get paid while on strike right? This will be interesting if it lasts a pay cycle and that direct deposit doesn’t show up. Rent is expensive.

“ Tommy used to work on the docks, union's been on strike He's down on his luck, it's tough, so tough” - living on a prayer by bon jovi

Re: New York Times Tech Guild goes on strike

#768

Post by duderific »

lolinder wrote: post #721
vundercind wrote: post #709

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty sure the wider harm of the NYT halting operations for an entire week—which isn't remotely what's happening—would be effectively zero, even during the week of a presidential election. What's the problem? Teachers and health care workers try to be more careful because a bunch of vulnerable people (children, patients) with little to no say in anything about how their respective institutions run are heavily de…

Exactly, if anything this strike is timed to do the least damage to the general public relative to the amount of impact it has on the business. The election has already been decided, we're just waiting to tally the votes. Most people have already decided if they're going to vote and if so who for. If they had striked last week or the week before they'd have been accused of election interference. Striking this week hu…

Hard disagree. The most important part of the election, from a news perspective, will be during/after the count, especially if it looks like Harris will win, or it's exceedingly close. Maybe this wouldn't be the case pre-Trump, when elections were decided relatively quickly, and you could assume a peaceful transfer of power.

Re: New York Times Tech Guild goes on strike

#769

Post by hildolfr »

lc9er wrote: post #585
code_for_monkey wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

why are tech workers, my industry, so committed to this ideology? Do you think the tech layoffs of the last few years was a justified culling of lazy idiots?

I'm old enough to remember a time when people in tech were called 'wizards' and there was an air of mystery that surrounded the industry. A large subset of this group really seems to have bought into the idea that working in tech makes you 'special'. It does not. It's a skilled profession that is trainable and attainable by large swaths of the population. Working in tech does not make you special (Yes - you) and the…

Have you found the things you say to actually be true?

I've worked with people that were passionate about the art their entire life , and I've worked with on-job trained people in equivalent positions -- the difference in code quality/structure/logic is pretty telling between the two camps.

It certainly makes one think that either the skill set is 'special', or that we're really in the experimental trial phase of learning how to teach it to those otherwise uninterested.

Re: New York Times Tech Guild goes on strike

#770

Post by [deleted] »

downrightmike wrote: post #714

Regarding RTO: https://thehill.com/opinion/technology/4747313-remote-work-b... The research backs up all the good things that have come out of remote working since at least the pandemic started. Everything is great, employees do better work and the employer gets better work done. Which was never in doubt if you look at research and metrics. The kerfuffle about remote being bad only has the stated negative of somethin…

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