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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

#951

Post by nox101 »

SiempreViernes wrote: post #791
slt2021 wrote: post #735

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? Probably not, the striking union is the one that contains all the data analysts at the NYTimes, so they have some experience with sociology data. > Whoever made this claim, did they control for other factors, like job title/level or productivity? As explained in the article, the data analysts union mad this claim, it's even explicit…

and here's the woman who won a Nobel prize for proving otherwise

https://freakonomics.com/podcast/a-new-nobel-laureate-explai...

Re: New York Times Tech Guild goes on strike

#952

Post by tightbookkeeper »

tsunamifury wrote: post #121
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.

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”

It’s actually that large organizations operate on people with average skill, and there is a significant inefficiencies as organizations grow.

So yes, 10 skilled people could run a site that large (and do). But you can’t run a company to recruit and manage that team over decades. “Well just find 10 smart and motivated people who work well together and can be given autonomy to do the right thing and hope they give us what we want” is not an actionable management plan.

Re: New York Times Tech Guild goes on strike

#953

Post by nusl »

lxgr wrote: post #761
micromacrofoot wrote: post #757

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"?

This is pretty much implied here. Perplexity is an AI-focused company. They're trying to make money off of a shitty situation. AI is a "cheap" tool to use for this purpose. It's really, really scummy.

Re: New York Times Tech Guild goes on strike

#954

Post by tourmalinetaco »

bankcust08385 wrote: post #933
legitster wrote: post #699

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but you are also appealing for public sentiment. So there's a reason why teacher's unions carefully time their strikes so they don't clash with important events like SAT season. I'm not arguing they need to pick the slowest week, but striking a balance seems pretty reasonable and pretty standard for most other unions.

Teachers are also paid crap because they continue to work for starvation wages. They should strike more because they will not receive more compensation with gentle pleas that are convenient.

Teachers make a fair salary. It’s a degreed position with ~100 days PTO annually, so when you account for that the benefits actually outweigh most degreed positions. One could argue the ceiling is closer, particularly for primary education, but that’s a problem of govt funding more than anything.

Re: New York Times Tech Guild goes on strike

#955

Post by caskstrength »

jjmarr wrote: post #893
slt2021 wrote: post #735

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…

The gender pay gap disappears when you control for hours worked, job seniority, and experience. So, why do women work less hours than men and have less experience? That's still an issue even if it's not directly sexist. If we read some bullet points from your post: > Men are more likely than women to have more years of continuous experience in their current occupation. What crawls on four legs and causes women to dro…

> What crawls on four legs and causes women to drop out of the labour force?

"Women earn less due to sexist discrimination" and "women earn less due to bearing the brunt of raising children" are two distinct claims. The first one is contentious and widely disputed (disproved?).

Re: New York Times Tech Guild goes on strike

#956

Post by tourmalinetaco »

seoulbigchris wrote: post #904
bwilliams18 wrote: post #890

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I doubt the NYT's tech stack requires intervention of engineers or product or design people to get out a physical or digital edition of the paper.

That makes sense. So perhaps the immediate impact on operations on election day coverage / reporting is more symbolic than real?

It depends on the internal infrastructure for electoral votes and real-time access of official data. If it’s been set up for a while and a few switches need flipped then it’s likely readers won’t notice. If however the system needs to be changed in any way there may just be some problems. Definitely gonna be fun to see if this causes any problems.

Re: New York Times Tech Guild goes on strike

#957

Post by tourmalinetaco »

purple_ferret wrote: post #315
insane_dreamer wrote: post #161

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

The strength of a union is have a large organization with funds for lawyers and such. Most of those organizations (like the UAW) don't focus on technology positions, so software people are left out in a lurch a bit. NYTimes has savvy, vocal people in it that have someone overcome this.

Or, more accurately, tech positions pay well and have good benefits so rarely benefit from unions.

Re: New York Times Tech Guild goes on strike

#958

Post by hnben »

anonu wrote: post #842
7thpower wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are doing god’s work. Also, fyi for others. Many public libraries have NYT daily access codes you can use for free. It’s a bit of a pain to have to renew each day you want to read NYT but is still great to have. Having a gift link is even more convenient.

The irony of your comment is that tech workers want pay increases (amongst other things) and here we're talking about avoiding paying for their product. NYT is a great publication and I'm happy to pay less than a $1 a day for tons of great content.

I sympathize with the workers, but NYT is no org I want to support again

Re: New York Times Tech Guild goes on strike

#959

Post by thanksgiving »

hansvm wrote: post #905
jjmarr wrote: post #893

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The gender pay gap disappears when you control for hours worked, job seniority, and experience. So, why do women work less hours than men and have less experience? That's still an issue even if it's not directly sexist. If we read some bullet points from your post: > Men are more likely than women to have more years of continuous experience in their current occupation. What crawls on four legs and causes women to dro…

> four legs, ... If we, as a society, want to encourage more kids, we should to allocate those funds as a society, much like roads or anything else (we do, tax benefits, ..., maybe we should do more). If we want to offer welfare for people regardless of their life constraints, that's again a societal decision (and one I'm mostly in favor of). Pushing that to each individual employer sets up a cat and mouse game where…

We can't even do something simple that I would like to see happen — make WIC universal with no conditions. It already covers about half of all children so it basically only doubles the budget. We can afford it and it saves so much time and energy trying to police the system.

Another one is free of cost universal pre-K. A lot of women can't go to work because there is nobody at home to take care of their children. But really the easiest lowest hanging fruit is universal WIC. Make it available to everyone so it is easier for us to tell people to get it.

Re: New York Times Tech Guild goes on strike

#960

Post by fastball »

lolinder wrote: post #510
fastball wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For (2), this is why you are seeing more and more off-shoring from the US to South America.

Yeah, but that doesn't solve any of the other problems.

Ok. Wasn't intending to address any of the other issues you raised, but I can because on further reflection there are many issues with your points:

(1) This generally isn't true for most companies. You must be in healthcare? Otherwise there are a bunch of state-level data protection laws which to my knowledge do not prevent access to PII by persons not within the US.

(2) Partially covered with my first comment about South America. I'll also note that asynchronous work seems to be more productive for a lot of people, and practically everyone in the corporate world complains about too many meetings – so maybe making it harder to constantly have meetings is a feature, not a bug (even if your org isn't great at async).

(3) Shared context might be helpful, but the design part is nonsense. Obviously non-Americans can design for the US market. Suggesting otherwise is just so ludicrous I don't know where to start.

(4) This is just a skill issue. You can definitely filter for quality in off-shore roles just as well as you can for on-shore roles. If you're bad at it, that's on you, not intrinsic to the off-shore labor or their circumstances.

(5) Saving money isn't the only reason to off-shore roles. Believe it or not there are actually more talented people you have access to if you consider all 8 billion of the world's population rather than only looking at 4% of it. Or for example with your first point where off-shoring can actually be a huge boon because diff timezones means all of your employees can work a 9-5 without needing people to work graveyard shifts. Also there are solutions like Deel which are less expensive than your average contracting middleman, but still allow you to hire people globally without needing to deal (pun intended by them I guess) with all the local tax etc issues. So even if money is your only concern, there is plenty of room left in the market for labor arbitrage.

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