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Comment by hungie | Hacker News Reader

Maintaining the site, embedding rich media content in the site, managing dynamic elements including apis, ads, etc, managing the cms software, managing payments, building customer service infrastructure, internal tools for developing and launching, security personnel, all the games, tracking engagement and reporting business metrics, building software to manage the physical processes printing and distribution of a massive periodical, managing suppliers, managing access for authors, editors, guest writers, site commenters, and social media workers, managing internationalization and accessibility... and probably a million things I'm forgetting.

The complexity of a massive org like the NYT is significantly non trivial.

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> building customer service infrastructure

The effort here is not to be underestimated. It took years for them to implement a cancel button.

Solid burn

> The complexity of a massive org like the NYT is significantly non trivial.

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.

Did you read the list of things I posted they have to do to ship their product? It's non trivial because those are hard problems and their space is large. It should be that complex because it is that complex.

No. I did not read your comment until now. Not sure how I replied to it.

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.

So is what you're arguing really that because its complex it shouldn't be done? So Netflix should never have been developed, because it wasn't needed and is very complex to run. You could already get videos at your local video store anyway.

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.

No. I am arguing it’s complex because of bad design decisions both in the software and business organization.

Everything they do today could be done with under 100 engineers, maybe less.

Is it? A lot of small startups seem to be able to do 80% of that list just fine.

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.)

The New York Times has a bunch of media visualizations that are often quite dynamic. Building those requires engineering and ux time. Then, ensuring they play well with their custom page layouts takes time.

I'm not talking about embedding video, I'm talking about custom built JavaScript data visualization elements.

> 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.

It appears you’ve bought into some anti-capitalism talking points. Wealth concentrating in shareholder hands may very well make the world better. A huge amount of that is in pension funds. This helps your parents remain independent in retirement.

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.

> It appears you’ve bought into some anti-capitalism talking points. Wealth concentrating in shareholder hands may very well make the world better. A huge amount of that is in pension funds. This helps your parents remain independent in retirement.

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?

Can you tell me where I claimed capitalism works perfectly for everybody?

So your justification for unions being bad is “capitalism works for some people”? So does a monarchy. So does fascism. I’m not even arguing against capitalism here - just for more worker power in a capitalist system.

I’m beginning to suspect you are answering the wrong posts. If you are in fact replying to me, please note that I said:

    I subscribe to the Times and am not anti-union.

> Efficiency is sometimes good.

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.

> Efficiency is always good

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.

Nothing is always good at any cost.

I am not saying that, I am saying that if a division can be run with half the people, there is nothing wrong in firing 40% of the people in that division, just to have a little overhead in case of emergencies.

Sure, in the platonic ideal of that example. But in the real world, firing 40% of a division will almost always mean a higher workload for the 60% remaining, which in turn leads to lower quality of life for those people, which often leads to higher turnover and projects getting dropped / mistakes getting made / etc.

This squeeze for efficiency is killing society fast, mark my words, no one but the most desperate will be willing to play that game to the end.

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.

Sauron was a villain not because he loved evil, but because he loved efficiency above all other things.

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.

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