Hacker News Reader

Comment by 86J8oyZv | Hacker News Reader

I interviewed there a couple years back. They loved me but the culture seemed pretty clearly to be "we are the elite of the elite reporters, and software engineers are brainless minions here at our pleasure." The offer was... commensurate with that way of thinking. Needless to say, I didn't accept.

View on HN

A few years before they shut operations here, I'd met a few engineers/journalists at Al Jazeera at a bar. They were gushing about how much the company had embraced tech and how they were having engineers & data scientists work together with journalists on breaking new stories. That included cross-training engineers to do passable journalism.

It seemed like they had a dream job and they were really keen on recruiting every decent engineer they could find.

Sad to see how that all ended up.

I work in media, that is how I always saw the New York Times, especially seeing as Mike Bostock came out of that camp.

I'm disappointed to hear they weren't much better than most [traditional] media companies when it comes to the digital approach, at least in HR.

The NYT is still in a whole other league over most media companies for their digital product and development.

Is that really a surprise though? This is going to be the experience at 100% of companies where tech is an operating expense, not a money maker.

Flipping things around, do you think a Pulitzer prize winning NYT editor would get the salary and respect they expect if they take up a job at a tech company writing marketing copy for their website?

> do you think a Pulitzer prize winning NYT editor would get the salary and respect they expect if they take up a job at a tech company writing marketing copy for their website?

Probably not the level of respect and deference they are accustomed to, but potentially higher pay?

MBA thinking-- "Everything's a cost center but me."

That's interesting. Maybe it's too small a sample, but I always found it interesting that NYT has at some point employed two very influential frontend developers: Mike Bostock (d3) and Rich Harris (svelte, rollup).

Also Jeremy Ashkenas (CoffeeScript, Backbone, Underscore).

Well, as someone who worked there and knows people actively doing dev there I can vouch that that isn’t the case.

You missed out on a unique life opportunity.

Eh, I make well over twice what they offered now, still live in a MCOL area that I love, am set to retire early having grown up in a poor area in a poor family for the area, and am building awesome unique software that has the potential to make the world better. I feel I made the right choice.

Thats great. If I were in this life just-for-the-money I would have left media long time ago :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com