NYT is among the top 50 most visited websites in the world and gets upwards of 700M visitors a year. They have apps on every platform. They have interactive content. They host videos and livestreams. They have games. They have a huge social media presence. They have an ads platform. They have the same overall technical challenges as any large tech company.
I'm not OP, but I'm also irritated by these kinds of questions, especially during discussions about labor disputes. This is a well-established recipe to muddy the waters for all posts touching on tech workers and labor unions (all 3 are present in the comments, here):
- '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.
To run a site with 1B views a month or more you don't need many people. At my $day_job we have hundreds of millions of views per year and we're less than 100 _tech workers_, of which about ~ 10 do infrastructure and the rest are developers.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
This type of comment shows up on every single post about unions or layoffs.
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.
Additionally, we have no idea what kind of internal legacy services need to be maintained inside the organization - I’m guessing the Tech guild doesn’t just cover the externally facing website.
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.
Right, to deliver their product over a tech channel to their many millions of customers. No, that's not easy. Yes, that's necessarily complex.
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.
For a crossword, which shards pretty trivially, while already having a database team to deal with that side of things? Large orgs move slowly so there are many reasons why you couldn't write something over the weekend and deploy it that quickly, but the challenges at that level are bureaucratic, not technical.
NYT is by far the biggest success story in digital news. They are still building their subscriber base by making themselves a full-on lifestyle brand. Aside from being the preeminent newspaper in probably the whole world, they are driving a ton of engagement with games, cooking, wirecutter and The Athletic. Not to mention how much they leverage visual and data-driven journalism. I'd also imagine they are a huge juicy target for hackers of all stripes with all the info they are sitting on and the people they piss off.
