Could someone explain this? I have the NYT app on my phone and play a few of their games… I don’t pay for a subscription and I am not served any ads. How does my usage of the app impact the NYT or the strike?
If you’re not paying for a service, your information is still being sold, NYT Games engagement numbers are still going up, etc. Not participating hurts NYT pretty marginally - but it’s not like you’re calling them up to cancel your subscription.
From the quote in this article it is a request for solidarity while they strike.
How does that work? (I have an impoverished elderly friend who would love to play their games.)
It’s not about financial penalties to the NYT, it’s about solidarity with the strikers.
This is the first I’ve heard about a strike by the techies at the Times.
Can somebody please tell me if I should care about it?
A very quick google showed me that the tech workers are already being paid $190,000 --which is $40,000 more than the journalists who produce the product which the techies paywall and track cookies for.
Oh, and they are complaining about having to come into the office twice a week.Horrors.
I have a subscription but my husband used to play without one. He may have played on the website rather than the app, and it didn’t keep stats .
Are we talking about a paid subscription ?
I appear to have registered (ie, given them an email address), but i don’t pay anything
and i play wordle.
Wordle is free.
The other games don’t work without a subscription.
(I use a pc and play on the website.)
They’re all free on the app, except the daily crossword. I dont have a subscription and play Connections, Strands and the Mini every day. I could also play Threads, Wordle, Tiles, Letter Boxed and Sudoku if I wanted to.
Yes, they all appear to be free on my laptop too,
They time their strike to impact the ability of the public to get information during an election because they’re not happy with their $190k salary and 3 day a week WFH.
As a proud supporter of unions, and believer that unions make the country a better place, I hope all these jobs get outsourced.
Yes, $190,000 average sounds like a lot (though that number is coming from the employer, so take it with a grain of salt, and does it include pension and other benefits?) but what kinds of salaries would those workers be getting at other companies?
You’re right, salary & compensation are two very different numbers as one includes all of your benefits, even those that you may elect not to utilize (group life, AD&D, flex spending & dependent care credits, those ‘helpline’ / employee assistance/ concierge phone numbers some companies offer. )
OTOH, NYC is one of the most expensive places to live in the US so a large salary there might just be average due to cost of living.
The larger point is it’s ridiculous to compare the salaries of those in technology roles to those of the journalists, since I don’t expect that most people could move from one role to the other. On the other hand, if you’re a member of the NYT Tech Guild, perhaps responsible for supporting the website or the Games app, your skills might land you another job at, say, Google or another technology company, where six-figure salaries like that are expected.
I have no opinion on the merits of their strike. But I’ll say this: software engineers regularly make quite a bit more than that. I was making $150,000 as a software engineer ten years ago and that wasn’t the top even back then. (I’m now retired, by the way.). If they want good software engineers they need to pay the going rate, which unfortunately is much higher than the going rate for journalists. Of course, they could always outsource the jobs, as someone here suggested.
Since they already have a contract with the union, I don’t think the employer can just fire everyone and outsource to a non-union contractor.
Plus, in my experience, contracting out technology jobs like this isn’t necessarily cheaper. There are layers of contracting companies between the client (the New York Times, in this case) and the actual technicians doing the work. All of those layers mark up the labor cost. And I’m guessing that what some of the Tech Guild does is support content to be published to the website today or tomorrow. A quick turnaround like that is harder with an outsourced work force.
Uh, what? They specifically said that using the news services was okay.
Also, the election needle thing on the website was working last night, though what it was telling me was depressing.
The Times reports that the Tech Guild decided to end the strike, although no deal was agreed to.