New York Times tech workers form a union

I interviewed there a couple years back. They loved me but the culture seemed pretty clearly to be &quot;we are the elite of the elite reporters, and software engineers are brainless minions here at <i>our</i> pleasure.&quot; The offer was... commensurate with that way of thinking. Needless to say, I didn&#x27;t accept.

I can&#x27;t find the column right now, but the columnist I read said that some of the internal tensions of the New York Times newsroom that have spilled out into public (well, &quot;public&quot; as defined by Twitter&#x27;s reality distortion field) are partly due to having employees -- specifically, the highly-valued and sought after tech employees -- having a greater say in corporate policy that their predecessors, the printing press operators and the delivery men, didn&#x27;t have.

I get the advantage of collective bargaining for workers, but I still can&#x27;t help but think that unions also add a lot of inertia and generally just have a dampening effect on agility, individual contribution, risk taking, etc. which is opposite of what you want for a software shop.<p>Maybe I&#x27;m wrong, and perhaps abusive megacorps really do need unions in place as a check against corporate power (never worked for one). I guess time will tell.

It has been an increasingly unpleasant place to work the last few years. This might be the thing that gets the last few of my friends there to leave.

Wow, how badly do you have to treat programmers to get them to unionize?

This should be a good experiment to see how unions affect technology. Is it neutral, does it enhance it or does it hinder it.<p>And the reporting, it would be nice to see the coverage of this by their own reporters or journalists.

Can someone tell me how nytimes gets away with no minority opinion piece writers.<p>I went on their homepage and 11 of the 12 opinion articles are written by non minority authors.<p>Can they do same here with unions and somehow get away with being anti union?<p>what is the logic here?

You reap what you sow

Finally.<p>The most trodden down workers of the first world - poor, starving programmers - who for the most part voluntarily passed on high salaries so they could &quot;be a force for the good&quot; and by joining news outlets [1], are stadning up to the powers that be (no one).<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.slowboring.com&#x2F;p&#x2F;whats-wrong-with-the-media" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.slowboring.com&#x2F;p&#x2F;whats-wrong-with-the-media</a>