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Not according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-visited_websites
or https://www.similarweb.com/top-websites/
or https://www.semrush.com/trending-websites/global/all
> gets upwards of 700M visitors a year.
archive.org the last one on Semrush list, gets 255.99M a month. At 59M a month, NYT is nowhere near the top 50.
"LooLoo Kids" YouTube channel, making nursery rhymes and children's songs, based in Romania has more viewers and subscribers than NYT. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-subscribed_YouTub...
I think people are underestimating how much tech it could take to run a company like the NYTimes.
- 'They make enough money, why do they need collective bargaining?'
- 'Why does NYT need SO MANY tech workers? It's a newspaper after all, right?'
- 'The job market is bad, so they should be THANKFUL to even have a job' OR 'They should just get a new job that pays better, the free market will fix it' - depending on how the job market looks.
Observation: answering the question you wished you were asked as opposed to the one you were asked is a conversation dominating tactic which reduces your credibility towards good-faith socratic dialogue.
In order to be successful you need to have quality, not quantity.
But to answer your statement, 600 is a lot of people to have around in the tech part of the company.
Where did you get this metric?
The complexity of a massive org like the NYT is significantly non trivial.
The effort here is not to be underestimated. It took years for them to implement a cancel button.
I think that is the point. At face value what they produce, simply should not be that complex. It seems it’s complex for the sake of being a big complex organization. And unions will only solidify that into stone to prevent any sort of optimization that would bring the complexity down.
It looks like you've bought into some anti-union talking points. Efficiency is sometimes good. But sometimes it's just a way of shifting profit from workers to capital. As an example: if I replace 100 workers managing a server farm with an AWS account - the money that would have paid 100 humans to have nice lives instead goes to a much smaller number of amazon workers, amazon shareholders, and whatever "savings" my company realizes goes to me the owner. So wealth concentrates in shareholders hands, and workers are laid off. Does that make the world better? Not really... more efficient, yes. More fragile and subject to one EMP or earthquake taking out trillions of dollars? Also yes.
Efficiency is always good. What you're basically saying is that you want to have your cake and eat it too. Which doesn't actually happen.
https://hbr.org/2019/01/the-high-price-of-efficiency
Efficiency is almost always at the cost of resilience. And that's just one dimension where efficiency is not always good.
Learning that efficiency comes with a cost, and sometimes that cost is our humanity, was a hard lesson for me to learn.
We always need to consider efficiency, but not always pursue it.
It will of course also increase desperation, which will make it seem like it sort of works all the way until it obviously doesn't.
Humans have to be put back at the top of the priority list, your line of reasoning is one better left to computers.
And while I agree that eliminating those 100 workers is terribly painful for many of them, it’s incumbent upon them to plan ahead for those contingencies. Likewise the investors must be ready for the Times to go out of business if the strike hurts them enough. The stock market is a brutally zero-sum game that doesn’t guarantee success to anyone.
From long before I embarked on my tech career I was always studying for the next job. To me it was evident that high paying tech jobs that required relatively little investment in learning were likely to be volatile. Lots of competition.
I subscribe to the Times and am not anti-union. (I also dislike the Times corporation and its owners.) Because the economy is so bad I wouldn’t recommend a strike at this time. In the 70s I watched in bafflement as the auto unions lined up unsupportable contracts that brought Detroit to its knees during a period of economic malaise very similar to this one. I couldn’t see how they could continue, and they collapsed under the weight of those contracts. I think the Times strike will backfire and hollow out he business just like the auto and recent Hollywood strikes did.
So all the people in my generation who won't be able to save up the ~1mil required to retire comfortably? or the people from previous generations who worked until they literally dropped dead because of a lack of access to excess funds and planning? those people don't seem to exist in your story of capitalism working perfectly for everybody. There are alternatives to maximizing profits, that allow everybody to retire comfortably - rather than just the lucky few.
> From long before I embarked on my tech career I was always studying for the next job.
I'm happy you've been able to manage that. If you're a barista, what is the next job if you're replaced with a robot vending machine? Should baristas not have good quality of life? Does you getting a good cup of coffee necessitate suffering from someone else?
I subscribe to the Times and am not anti-union.As bad as the modern web is, if you think embedding media is a hard problem, one of us has clearly gone bat crazy.
(To be clear, I welcome being told why embedding media is a really hard problem, but my experience hosting a self-implemented blog says otherwise.)
I'm not talking about embedding video, I'm talking about custom built JavaScript data visualization elements.
But anyways much of what you are listing is just more stuff that sounds complex or is not needed. It exist because there was money and it was a big bloated organization. It’s not needed to run the core business and frankly the cost of those things are still small. The number of users don’t change their engineering cost, or at least should not.
The promise of software is exactly the return on investment is not affected by the number of people who use it.
Also. You got me at dynamic content, that is the job of the software, not a human. If they have yet to provide user friendly interfaces down their editors to manipulate the content on their site without the need to interface with an engineer then they have already failed.
I know this sounds like a rant, and maybe it is. But I am tried of poorly ran companies justifying outrageous team sizes because they simply ignore any good design with their software and how to organize a company to be lean agile and successful.
And how are you deciding what is or is not needed. You're basically saying the company should never innovate or try anything new outside of their existing core business, and should minimize their chances for monetization in new verticals which basically no corporation would ever do. They're always looking for other sources of monetization since thats what investors want.
Everything they do today could be done with under 100 engineers, maybe less.
The answer is always the same: It might take you and a friend a weekend to build a [insert company] clone, but by the time you need to support the level of customers as [insert company] it'll certainly need a lot more work.
You could probably build something with modern technologies to satisfy internal requirements, but plenty of businesses look at the risk of moving to something new vs something that’s worked for a decade, and justifiably say let’s just pay the maintenance cost.
You and your buddies can build a crossword or whatever the hell in a weekend. You can't deliver is to 100 million people tomorrow, while also maintaining one of the US' largest newpapers online.