I encourage everyone to respect the picket line and get your news elsewhere until the workers get a deal.
The Times Workers are holding the line against arbitrary return to office mandates and for Just Cause protections. The vast majority of HN consists of developers, designers, QA, and PMs who stand to gain from a successful movement to win these rights.
Technically, wouldn't "respecting the picket line" be not doing any "scab" work for the NYTimes? Asking us not to use the NYTimes is more of a boycott and a separate question (and not always something strikers ask for). Is it official policy of the strike that they request people boycott in solidarity as well?
Hence the use of "and". It presents two separate ideas for you to think about:
- Respect the pickup line
- Get your news elsewhere
> The Tech Guild is asking readers to honor the digital picket line and not play popular NYT Games such as Wordle and Connections as well as not use the NYT Cooking app. Members of the newsroom union, Times Guild, have pledged not to do struck work, a right that’s protected under their contract.
https://nyguild.org/post/new-york-times-tech-guild-walks-off...
NYT Games and Cooking are BEHIND THE PICKET LINE. Please don’t play or engage with Games or Cooking content while the strike lasts!
News coverage — including election coverage — is NOT behind the picket line. It’s okay to read and share that, though the site and app may very well have problems.
https://bsky.app/profile/maggieastor.bsky.social/post/3la4qg...
If I pay for a service, I expect it to be available.
It’s not my job to track the status of labor disputes - it’s the job of the NYTimes (the organization) to ensure they deliver that service.
If they can’t, because they are dealing with ongoing labor disputes, then I’ll probably complain and cancel. The threat of those cancellations seems like plenty enough leverage for a striking union.
I don’t understand why I would need to preemptively refrain from a service I’ve already paid for.
I don’t think this is the outlook of an ally.
I think the answer to that is a strong union able to bring down the website and get management to the table.
This is why we all need unions.
Unions cannot cause intentional or malicious destruction of their workplace.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/01/politics/labor-strike-supreme...
Coding a time bomb into the website would be illegal, but they can't force you back to work to fix a bug/outage that happens to occur during the strike.
Especially with a huge election tomorrow.
And I guess it's not the case that no one is touching anything, it's being updated constantly.
I didn't meant to imply they would or should sabotage anything.
It's possible we'd hire junior engineers locally for the offshore roles if we went fully local, but there's zero chance that we could offshore any of our existing onshore roles. This is for a few reasons:
1. Data law compliance. We can't let people outside the US see PII, which precludes them from participating fully in many support roles, including rotations within engineering.
2. Time zone differences are huge. We have some developers in Eastern Europe who we love, but coordinating their work with the roles that we can't offshore is substantially trickier than local employees. At a certain point it's more rational to pay higher salaries for US-timezone employees.
3. Cultural differences get in the way. It's far easier for a product person or a designer to get an idea across to someone with shared cultural context, so there are fewer back and forth iterations when there are US employees on a project than when there aren't. For the same reason we can't offshore design roles since we're serving a US market, so that doesn't work as a solution.
4. There's substantial difficulty in filtering for quality. We have some offshore contractors who've been with us for years, but we've struggled whenever we tried to add new ones. Hiring is always hard but it's particularly hard when you're either doing it indirectly through a contracting company or doing it yourself across cultural barriers.
Lastly but perhaps most importantly, when we're doing offshoring through contracting companies who take a share of the fee, the difference in cost versus a US employee is much less significant. And if we're not using a contracting company then we're on the hook for figuring out the tax situation ourselves and as I mentioned filtering for quality is much harder. So it doesn't save as much money as people would assume to offshore a role.
(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.
That isn't to say that teams should be monocultural, but expecting to have high performing teams without any thought to culture, time zone, or communication ability is optimistic.
1. The businesses didn't know how to handle the workers not being in the office. While a problem in the past, this is now a solved problem thanks to COVID forcing them to figure it out.
2. The businesses tried to hire cheap workers. This is still going to fail, just as hiring minimum wage workers in the US for the job would fail. The workers you actually want charge the same no matter where their seat happens to be located. But I'm not sure that is applicable here as the parent is not talking about cost-cutting, but filling the roles that are no longer filled due to the strike.
I’ve been involved in a lot of software offshoring projects. It’s about twice as likely to end in failure compared to onshore software development services.
It has nothing to do with the price. I’ve worked with great devs who were cheap and terrible devs who were expensive. And it’s hard to tell which is which till the project ships or fails to ship.
Very interesting, thanks!
#2 is a possibility. What happens when you do it is that your cheap hires tend to stay for a short time (as they will get better offers later, possibly involving relocation to better countries). You end up with the ones that are cheap for a reason.
Most of reasons for failure is that incentives in between contractors and hiring company is misaligned, leadership have no idea what they are doing, cultural differences, time zone differences, etc.
If all the butts are in the same office, you are no longer offshoring. You've moved the entire business.
I don't think that is what anyone here is talking about, though. I certainly wasn't. Offshoring normally implies remote work.
But that's not the case anymore. The "onshore" workers are (or at least did for several years, giving the needed experience) also working remotely, so there is no longer an office barrier between the "onshore" business and the workers abroad.
Whether or not the workers "offshore" work together in an office or independently at coffee shops really makes no difference and has nothing to do with the conversation. If you mean the parent misinterpreted what we're talking about – that is likely true. But we're not going to change the subject just because he is confused.
No, like I spelled out, your response that I replied to misinterpreted the comment that you replied to. What they were pointing out was that the failure rate of offshore work was never due to offshore teams being unable to coordinate due to not being in-office, but because other other problems, such as culture. Also, the user that you replied to was the one who made the upper-level comment that you originally responded to, not the other way around.
Yes, that is what they pointed out, but it made no sense. The only way that could have applicability to the conversation is if you moved the entire business into that new "offshore" office, but then you wouldn't be "offshoring" anymore. You will have moved the business instead. Which isn't what anyone is talking about. The original comment is clearly about offshoring, not relocating businesses.
I expect you are right that the other commenter misinterpreted something and replied based on that misinterpretation. But, no need to change the subject because of their confusion. Especially when, as you point out, they established the subject! If it was good enough then, it remains good enough now.
No-one was referring to moving business and I'm still not sure where you are coming from with that. Moving a contained software business unit of a US based business to another country is not "moving the business", but is often how offshoring works. This doesn't involve moving the entire business, but just a mostly self-contained portion of it. I don't think surgical_fire misinterpreted anything. The quote above from surgical_fire explains their sentiment. Businesses in the US getting used to their onshore employees being remote doesn't solve any of these offshoring issues.
Exactly. So where do you think the statement in question fits?
> and I'm still not sure where you are coming from with that.
Well, you're certainly not going to figure it out if you keep going off on some strange tangent about an entirely separate part of the comment that has nothing to do with the discussion here and which nobody replied to. And, I might add, offered nothing of value as that part said the same thing as the comment posted approximately two hours prior.
But what is your motivation for being in that state? We can see you are purposefully trying to not figure it out. Not only are you not staying on topic, you haven't even asked a single question to try and help your understanding. What is to be gained in acting like an idiot? Just a show put on for the sake of the lolz?
Not workers doing the same jobs though. Look at how manufacturing was offshored over the past several decades -- for many companies, entire job trees within the US were eliminated. HQ is still in the US, but anything remotely having to do with manufacturing isn't. You have to go really high up the chain in those offshored manufacturing jobs before you see anyone actually interacting with an employee in the US.
And how are those not the same jobs...?
Is the end goal to just have management in a nice office and all production including hr, finance and IT overseas??
I mean those are office jobs, so they can WFH, so they can be in India or Philipines!! :)
Wow saving so much money!!!
Does a company work in a country or will they just take and take and take from the country and then not give jobs?
Almost making me nationalist (I am in the EU)
The goal of a company is indeed to make as much money while spending as little as possible. Why hire people when you don’t have to?
For example, multiple fast food companies have driven themselves into the ground by exploiting their franchise owners for fast cash. That's how Quiznos died. You would think murdering a company would actually be bad for C level people, but they just move on to the next company. They never seem to have a problem getting hired despite their past performance.
What prevents the NYT? In part: workers not just lying down and taking it. Just not “complaining” at all, like your implicit feel-for-you advice.
Hell, even in the NY area. Median household in the Bronx is only $37,397, meaning that half of the households are living there for less than that. And that's household income, which is usually about 1.5-2x above individual income. That's a huge margin against what these workers are being paid.
But people don't sell things based on cost. Hell, a lot of people lose money when they sell things. Around 10% of the US population have a negative income in a given year! People instead charge as much as they can (or think they can, at least) get.
And anyone who is worth hiring offshore can get just as much as a local (within some reasonable margin; there can be frictional costs to offshore hiring that won't change the cost to the employer, but will reduce what makes it to the worker). You can sometimes get lucky and hire someone who doesn't understand their worth, both locally and offshore, but you can't count on that (and they aren't apt to stick around for long once they realize their worth). On balance, it costs the same no matter where you go.
Cheaper and submissive labor doesn't result in high-quality products.
Personally, I have considered the arguments and concluded that I am not interested in collective bargaining or joining a union.
Wouldn't you send a stronger message if you picketed at home?
If enough people fight for the recognition of their need and desire to work from home, enough to enshrine it in some legal norms or at least in widely accepted and expected practices in the industry, WFH may become a right. This is how 40-hour work weeks became a right, or collective bargaining became a right, etc.
It became a standard in the US, but is not a right. And while the idea of the 40-hour work week did, indeed, come from labour groups, it was the Great Depression needing effort to try and compel businesses to hire more workers, not the fight of workers, that pushed to see it become a standard.
It wasn't a sudden bout of benevolnce from the FDR administration, or from anyone in the management or government.
Was there something to suggest it was? Getting workers back working isn't for the benefit of workers.
Also a reminder that just a few years ago, CEOs thought remote work was good, everyone was productive, and they didn't see how they wanted to force everybody back. No, it's not a privilege, it's just how you get work done.
I think it's fair to point out that progressive worker rights acquisition would initially always be a small case minority context (vs the vast majority that would lack those rights).
In the distant past almost everyone in the world lacked xyz worker rights.
I'd call it a perk or benefit. It's like health insurance or vacation time. You may not have a right to it, but it's upsetting when you lose it.
When an employer takes away something you have a right to, you don't strike, you sue.
I'm not going back to having to bring earmuffs and blast music all day just to have any hope of getting anything done, I'm not starting a commute, and I'm not sacrificing lunches with my kids for some executive's opinion about how I ought to collaborate most effectively.
Meanwhile in the early 20th century:
> They're striking over a weekend? I work five days a week and value it but it never would occur to me to strike for that. I view it as a privilege and not a right
Like, this is generally how it goes; workers' rights are generally won, not granted by divine authority.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight-hour_day_movement
In the United States, Philadelphia carpenters went on strike in 1791 for the ten-hour day. By the 1830s, this had become a general demand. In 1835, workers in Philadelphia organised the 1835 Philadelphia general strike, the first general strike in North America, led by Irish coal heavers. Their banners read, From 6 to 6, ten hours work and two hours for meals.[37] Labor movement publications called for an eight-hour day as early as 1836. Boston ship carpenters, although not unionized, achieved an eight-hour day in 1842.
I believe that the value from WFH varies a lot from person to person.
If you were working from the office before and the company changed to a WFH policy, you might see it as a nice to have. You already made some life choices to accommodate going to the office. Maybe you even go to the office anyway.
But, if you were hired when the company already had WFH, you probably made some life choices based on that (buying a house far away from the city, having kids, not buying a car,...). In that case, mandatory RTO is a complete disaster (especially with the housing crisis) and you pretty much have no option other than resigning.
I assume NYT was doing WFH since ~2020, so a lot of employees probably took decisions based on WFH, therefore the strikes.
Other folks have already pointed out the "rights" unions have fought for that we take for granted today. On top of that, being in a union is about solidarity with your fellow workers. You can support your coworkers' who need or just want to work from home. This should be easy, since it would affect you in approximately zero ways. They'll have your back for fighting for Just Cause protections.
If it is arbitrary, why is the NYT seemingly standing firm on the issue? As the article tells, NYT have agreed to a seven month grace period to give workers a chance to get their houses in order. That is not indicative of an arbitrary move.
Perhaps you mean they are striking against mandates that are motivated by undisclosed reasons?
You'll have to ask NYT management if you're curious why they're doing something. I can venture a guess though. A lot of companies use RTO mandates as a way to avoid layoffs (and the negative press and severance requirements that come with them). This seems to go hand in hand with the demand for "just cause".
As the article tells, NYT have agreed to a seven month grace period to give workers a chance to get their houses in order. That is not indicative of an arbitrary move.
This doesn't follow.
I don't have to ask them anything if they are truly doing it arbitrarily. That's the answer.
But the question is if you are confusing "arbitrary" with "not knowing". Which is I guess I am to take that the answer is yes, that you are confused, since you admit to not knowing – which means you can't know that it is arbitrary.
How did you end up so confused?
> This doesn't follow.
If it is arbitrary, why not institute it today on a whim (strike notwithstanding)? Why wait? This indicates that there is planning involved, which suggests that it isn't arbitrary. It does not prove it without a doubt, but when playing the odds…
You're aware that NYC is an extremely expensive place to live, right?
Isn't this the default state of affairs for american private enterprise? This is why PIPs are so wildly popular—it's trivial to fabricate performance reasoning regardless of the actual motivations for firing.
Granted, I don't see how you could negotiate your way out of this. We need federal labor protections to make serious movement on this.
Not in a position to help you guys in any way, but fight the good fight against the mythology of the grand collaborative campfire that apparently happens in-office.
Especially as the bloc grows. If the "someone abroad" is also part of the same bloc, management ends up running out of people to turn to. A rising tide floats all boats.
(It's even more extreme in some countries. I've heard tale of situations in Scandinavian nations where a restaurant owner who mistreats their serving staff will find, in addition to the staff leaving and nobody being willing to scab for them, that their deliveries are delayed because nobody will drive ingredients to them and if their sink breaks down no plumber will take the contract to fix it).
I find your suggestion that I should consider the trust I've built with their news division destroyed on this day of all days ridiculous and irresponsible, especially given the fact that the timing of the strike was chosen to hurt me extremely badly if I should feel morally obligated to follow your advice
While I wholeheartedly support their legal right to organize, I am not required to celebrate at the cynicism of attempting to undermine faith in democracy to win a better job
You're being melodramatic. There are piles of news sources to choose from, absent NYT. And that assumes it falls over due to the strike, although it seems likely they need workers on hand to do ops.
But with there being such a strong probability that there will be coordinated far-right attempts to undermine faith in our system of elections tomorrow, I do really do think of tomorrow as a kind of holy day for democracy that is not acceptable to use as bargaining chip.
Nothing about an election where only the votes of people in 7 states out of 50 matter can possibly be "holy" for democracy.
I don't need the far-right to undermine faith in our system of elections; I'm not far-right and have never had any faith in it to begin with.
Election day, assuming that is what you are referring to, is the least important day in democracy. It is every day after the person is hired, when you stay on top of them and communicate your expectations to them, when democracy happens.
I’m not gonna support your cynical anti-union, anti-worker policy of blaming everything on the part of the workers while dismissing the management side with a “I don’t doubt it”.
Two can play this game.
Also, there are more than one reputable news source. This protest isn't going to hurt you
Not having this solved well ahead of time speaks poorly of NYT overlords. My trust in NYT has deteriorated quite a bit over the years :(
A few sincere questions:
1. Are there no other news sources that you'd trust to convey the binary of 'who won the election?'
2. Assuming that there aren't, what negative effect would there be to you from not knowing the result of the election for a few days?
I'm sorta hoping that "hurt me extremely badly" is an exaggeration for effect. If not I'd suggest getting some perspective.
Unless you sincerely think there's going to be widespread political violence in your specific area, knowing about what's going on in at this exact moment is honestly as much about entertainment as anything else. And if you need local news, the NYT is typically not the best place.
I'm as guilty of rubbernecking as anyone, but I wouldn't go so far as to claim that boycotting my favorite news source for a few days would be extremely damaging to me.
You're talking about Jan 6 like it was just some minor scuffle. And I agree that it did not ultimately amount to more than that, but do not forget that at the time there were two live bombs on the ground, we were in a constitutional crisis, the president seemed to be hoping that if he maintained silence his supporters would carry out a forceful takeover of the government which he assured them would be righteous in his view.
The fact that there was not more escalation had a lot to do with how many people were watching closely, as well as with the actions of a few individuals like Mike Pence and Brad Reffensperger who, at the most important moments, decided that their duty was to all Americans and not just to one man.
It had absolutely nothing to do with the rubberneckers (myself included) who were following it from moment to moment on the other side of the country.
Some small percentage of the watchers are in a place to actually do something about it, and if that's you then fine. Most of us don't need to know on the day of, we've just grown accustomed to knowing, and it's probably honestly a net negative for the world that we do follow things that are outside of our control so closely.
The opinions of the people who are comfortable sitting by while the conspiracy "steals the election" (or more likely, the astrotufed reactions put forward by sockpuppets of the conspirators themselves) don't matter by the time you get to the point of invading the US capitol.
Trump was being cynical, but the insurrectionists themselves were just nuts. They couldn't have cared less what Twitter thought.
... and in no small part due to the actions of police officer Eugene Goodman [1], who diverted away the incoming rioters with about 60 seconds or so to spare - had he not done that, the mob would likely have been able to take hostages.
It was sheer fucking luck and a couple of very VERY brave individuals that kept the death count of Jan 6th in the single digits (at least if one excludes the police officers committing suicide in the months after).
What the shit does it help the Capital police if there is some sort of coup attempt and you watch it on TV? Does that really save America somehow? People are so desperate to be bystanders to things they could have prevented by making better choices months earlier.
(There actually are strikes which are consciously run on this basis, but mostly only in the most safety-critical fields.)
Like, it's not as if the NYTimes was unaware that it'd be a big news week; you should probably be blaming management more than anyone else here.
Watching a car crash, totally outside of your control in real time is not healthy. Skip the will they / won't they and find something healthier to do with the 24 hours or so of uncertainty.
These days news publications generally have a pretty weak business model and a lot of competition. Does it still make sense to have a union in this case? Why?
https://www.cnbc.com/2024/11/04/new-york-times-nyt-q3-earnin...
> Total revenue of $640.2 million was in line with estimates of $640.8 million, as digital advertising thrived.
> Adjusted profit was 45 cents per share.
There are 164,540,000 shares outstanding.
That gives a profit of $74,043,000
They have 5900 employees for a profit per employee per quarter of $12,550
While yes, they are profitable this doesn't suggest that there is a lot of room between profit, pay raise per employee and net loss for the company.
Contrary to perhaps popular misconception, if the business is unprofitable, unions aren't going to demand a larger piece of a disappearing pie. If there isn't money to be paid out, there's nothing to fight over. Leading a union or negotiating for a union does not fundamentally turn you into an unreasonable person at the negotiating table.
The problem is (much like the rest of the economy) what passes for news media is incredibly top heavy and bloated with managers, executives, and shareholders who suck up money without providing any value.
For every journalist there are 15 managers and editors hired for nepotism reasons. The NYT is full of people like that who do nothing but trot out right wing editorials supporting whatever war the US is involved in[4] or attacking people who think the world can be a better place[3]. I used to pay for The Atlantic but for every Ed Yong writing amazing science articles there's a right wing editor like Jeffrey Goldberg[1] sucking up money and shitting out right wing propaganda[2].
This article[0]from 404 said it well.
>Then I went to work for VICE, and made working at VICE part of my identity. I wanted the company to succeed so badly because I believed in what we were doing and I believed in the institution. I worked zillions of hours of unpaid overtime, took on side projects, canceled vacations to do work, worked on vacations, and made incredibly hard decisions, thinking that, if I did my job well enough, the company would succeed and we would get to keep doing what we were doing. I spent the vast majority of that time doing work that made money for an over-bloated apparatus that existed to make a bunch of middle managers and executives large salaries and bonuses and to benefit a founder who is now retroactively denigrating our work in an attempt to cling to whatever relevancy he can find by catering to conspiracy theorists and the right.
I hope journalists leave the old right wing media like the NYT and Washington Post and start their own things focusing on journalism. I gladly pay for that.
0 https://www.404media.co/the-billionaire-is-the-threat-not-th... 1: https://fair.org/home/conspiracies-pushed-by-atlantics-edito... 2: https://citationsneeded.libsyn.com/episode-198-how-the-atlan... 3: https://fair.org/home/nyts-campus-free-speech-coverage-focus... 4: https://fair.org/home/20-years-later-nyt-still-cant-face-its...
Really? I don't believe this at all. I have not seen a properly edited published piece online in over a decade, and it continues to get worse. From obvious spelling errors and sentence fragments to full blown loss of coherent thoughts. The obviousness of multiple contributors' work being mashed together with the same information being repeated multiple times within the piece clearly shows that no editor is looking over the work at all. No editor worth their salt would allow that kind of work.
Like just ask chatgpt or your dog to make something up that sounds contemporary and newsy. Same quality level.