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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

#851
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.

I worked lots of places. Never worked for a manager I didn't trust to fire me.

Most managers are pretty good but organizing lots of a people is really hard. And there is something like a leaky abstraction for every level of the organization as goals and context and understanding get filtered and warped as information travels up and down the org chart. You're manager is your closely interface to the insanity of distributed human decision making, so they usually are seen as bad and are blamed for all of the dysfunction of the organization when they're trying to make the best of an imperfect situation.

Re: New York Times Tech Guild goes on strike

#852
post #797

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Crossing the picket line like this is craven and opportunistic.

Pretty opportunistic to strike right before what is likely one of the highest traffic days for the NYT all year too

That's also known as playing your cards effectively

Re: New York Times Tech Guild goes on strike

#853

Related :/ Perplexity CEO offers to replace striking NYT staff with AI https://techcrunch.com/2024/11/04/perplexity-ceo-offers-to-r...

I think the NYT should take him up on that offer. Those striking can probably pull off a 404media business model instead while they watch NYT turn into USA Today, except worse.

But they write software for NYTimes, they don't write journalism.

Additionally NYTimes benefits from huge networks effects – both in that they are a comprehensive source of (reasonably) reliable journalism which attracts lots of readers but also that they know lots of sources. It also helps that it's one of the better newspapers around (probably second to the FT).

Re: New York Times Tech Guild goes on strike

#854

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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" c…

> 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?

I can’t speak for these numbers, but when we do them we account for these things. Obviously pay isn’t going to be fair, but it should be less unfair than it is at many places.

Part of the reason women get paid less where I currently work is because they ask less. That doesn’t mean every white man is paid much better, because not all men ask either. In general, however, you can generalise across experience, productivity, seniority and so on and say that some groups are paid less. There are a lot of factors which play into this beyond people not asking. Our metrics also show that employees who ask less frequently or are in general less assertive are also much less likely to leave their jobs. As such it becomes less of a risk to not give them raises. Risk of employees leaving is a factor you consider when balancing your budget, and I’m sure you can imagine other things which may play into this, some of which, shouldn’t.

Re: New York Times Tech Guild goes on strike

#855
post #854

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>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" c…

> 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? I can’t speak for these numbers, but when we do them we account for these things. Obviously pay isn’t going to be fair, but it should be less unfair than it is at many places. Part of the reason women get paid less where I currently wo…

> Part of the reason women get paid less where I currently work is because they ask less.

Yes, and that’s because as study after study has shown they’re less likely to successfully get more and not have it held against them.

> New research by Berkeley Haas Professor Laura Kray shows the belief that women don’t ask for higher pay is not only outdated, but it may be hurting pay equity efforts. Contrary to popular belief, professional women now report negotiating their salaries more often than men, but they get turned down more often, Kray found.

https://newsroom.haas.berkeley.edu/research/new-research-sha...

Re: New York Times Tech Guild goes on strike

#856

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>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" c…

If you have the time, could you explain what you think "gender studies" entails? Not to step on your broader point at all, but I think you might need to pick a better strawman here. I can only speak anecdotally with my many years in the "liberal arts", but feel pretty confident you would be laughed out of the classroom for bringing such a thing up, whatever side of it you are on. Its just more of a thing people like…

"Gender studies" is usually used as a dog whistle for low rigor Liberal Arts programs like Psychology (as opposed to high rigor STEM programs like Physics).

Colleges aggressively enroll low-SAT high schoolers in these low rigor fields, because they want their federal student loan money at overinflated tuition. Colleges have only incentive to overproduce students and hand out diplomas like candy in exchange for student loan money.

The problem with over-enrollment of low-SAT students in low rigor fields is Replication crisis[1]. A lot of "research papers" are being produced every year due to sheer over-production of graduate students in these fields, and with pressure to "publish-or-perish" a lot of research ends up bogus, fake, non-replicated or p-hacked.

This NYT claim caught my attention because they used words "average wage per gender/race" - which is telling sign they used simple Excel's AVERAGE() to get their "insights".

In a more rigorous field like econometrics/statistics, you would be laughed at if you make such claim because average numbers hide a lot of nuance, required to understand the field. If one were to control for certain confounding variables, one would get a much better understanding of a "wage gap" or "racial gap" issue and understand each individual components of the gap, rather than blaming everything on strawman "institutional racism" or "institutional misogyny" or whatever

  1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis

Re: New York Times Tech Guild goes on strike

#857

I love all the bellyaching about the NYT missing that election coverage money. Perfect time to go on strike. They're only asking for a 2.5% salary increase YoY (which is very inflation-y) and some WFH days. That's a pretty mild ask. NYT will be signing on the dotted line within a week I believe given the risk to their revenue if they don't cover the second Trump-vs-Kamala. The section vs-Woman-Candidate election in a…

There are much bigger asks from the union. For instance extreme limits on being able to terminate employees. Which… yikes. If nyt caves on this, look for it to go the way of police and teacher unions where incompetent people flourish while the quality of output nosedives.

Re: New York Times Tech Guild goes on strike

#859

> 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…

What's crappy about the union striking when they have leverage? Should they have waited until the strike would apply less pressure to their employer?

When Rail unions in Europe strike during holidays, they do get leverage, but it infuriates the general public and creates a lot of bad press for the union.

Re: New York Times Tech Guild goes on strike

#860

Have devs at any of the large tech companies ever tried to unionize? If not, why not?

Grindr devs did ("large"). Announced intention to unionize in July of 2023. In August 2023, the gay republican CEO then made a RTO requirement to force all of engineering to Chicago, after hiring everyone as remote first for years. But designers and project managers would be forced to move to LA. The union filed an unfair labor practice with the NLRB, but that process has dragged for over a year, even after the union…

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