This is a big deal. My former colleagues in the New York Times Tech Guild have declared a strike today in response to a number of unfair labor practice violations and management’s inability to bargain in good faith. From the Washington Post:

Represented by the NewsGuild of New York, the Tech Guild has been negotiating its first contract with the company since 2022. Both sides have accused the other side of bogging down contract talks, which have recently focused on three key issues: “just cause” job protections (which ensure employees can’t be fired without reason and due process), remote work and pay equity. Unit members voted overwhelmingly in September to authorize the strike, saying the timing of the authorization — in the run-up to the high-profile election period — was “no accident.”

I urge you to join me in supporting the strike fund, which will help more vulnerable members to weather the strike.

Beyond that, the Guild asks supporters to refrain from interacting with Cooking and Games, and to break your streaks. Times reporters Maggie Astor has the details:

As of this morning, the New York Times Tech Guild, which represents NYT tech workers, is on strike.

Unless it’s resolved while today’s Wordle is still live, this streak is gone.

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 is NOT behind the picket line. It’s okay to read and share that, though the site and app may have problems.

Read the whole thread for more information, which, as she says, “the rules may not be what you think!”

December 22, 2023 was my last day at The New York Times. My tenure was just under two and a half years.

My first 19 months at the company were pretty much everything I had hoped, as I collaborated with Design and Product to design a distributed platform and conceived, designed, and implemented CipherDoc, a service for encrypted data management. I’m incredibly proud of that work!

But alas, plans change. After the company mothballed the project, I refocused my time on glue work: re-platforming services, upgrading runtimes and dependencies, improving logging and observability, and documenting code, architectures, and playbooks. It felt good to reduce the onboarding, maintenance, and on-call overhead for my teams; I hope it helps them to be more productive and fulfilled in their work.

I treasure the terrific people I met at The Times, just super thoughtful, empathetic, and creative co-workers, partners, and colleagues. It’s no wonder they had the energy to form a union, The Times Tech Guild, for which I’m gratified to have helped organize and steward members. The Guild connected me with a far broader range of talented and committed people than I would have otherwise. I will miss them all, and continue to cheer for and support the movement from the outside.

And now, as 2023 winds down, I’ve decided to try something new. More news in the new year!

Me, writing for NYT Open:

The Identity Team at the Times, responsible for building and maintaining identity and authentication services for all of our users, has embarked on an ambitious project to build a centralized identity platform. We’re going to make a lot of decisions, such as what languages we should use, what database, how we can best protect personal information, what the API should look like, and so much more. Just thinking about the discussions and consensus-building required for a project of this scope daunts even the most experienced decision-makers among us. Fortuitously, a presentation at StaffPlus NYC by Comcast Fellow John Riviello introduced a super fascinating approach to collective decision-making, the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP).

I quite enjoyed our experiment with AHP, a super useful tool for collective decision-making. For a less technical primer, Wikipedia has some great examples:

• Choosing a leader for an organization
• Buying a family car

The New York Times Editorial Board in an unusually direct piece last week:

It is regular citizens [who threaten election officials] and other public servants, who ask, “When can we use the guns?” and who vow to murder politicians who dare to vote their conscience. It is Republican lawmakers scrambling to make it harder for people to vote and easier to subvert their will if they do. It is Donald Trump who continues to stoke the flames of conflict with his rampant lies and limitless resentments and whose twisted version of reality still dominates one of the nation’s two major political parties.

In short, the Republic faces an existential threat from a movement that is openly contemptuous of democracy and has shown that it is willing to use violence to achieve its ends. No self-governing society can survive such a threat by denying that it exists. Rather, survival depends on looking back and forward at the same time.

See also this Vox piece. Great to see these outlets sound the alarm about the dangers to American democracy. The threats are very real, and clear-eyed discussions should ver much be dominating the public sphere.

More of this, please.

Some news: I’m super happy to report that I started a new job last week at The New York Times.

After ten years at iovation, the last four working remotely from New York City and the last three under the ownership of TransUnion, I felt it was time to find something new. At The Times, I’ve taken the role of Staff Engineer on a new team, User Systems. I’m particularly stoked for this gig, as it falls right into areas of abiding interest, including privacy-by design, personal data protection, encryption, authentication, credential management, and scaling a vital app for the whole business. Add that to the straightforward commute once the office reopens, and it’s hard to find something more ideal.

I truly appreciate the extraordinary experience of my ten years at iovation. I originally thought I’d stay a couple years, but was so engaged by the people and the great work we did that I kept at it. I learned a ton about product engineering, product design, and scalable architectures, but especially about working with terrific colleagues who made me a better person even as I tried to be of service to them. I will especially miss working with Scott, Kurk, Clara, Travis, John, and Eric — and countless others. I wish them all the best, and would enjoy working with any and all of them again anytime.

Now I’m excited to make new connections working with my amazing new colleagues at The Times. I expect we’ll collaborate on fulfilling work building super useful tools that advance The Times mission to inform and empower its readers. I’m delighted to be jumping on this ride with them.

It is absolutely astonishing how readily our congress uses the Katrina catastrophe to further anti-environmental and pro-corporate energy ends.

Tell them no.

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Overheard:

Steven: Did you see that article in the Sunday Times about the teenage brain?

Julie: What, you mean they found one?

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I’m going to have to order the “Outfoxed” DVD and give it a look. It got a great writeup in the New York Times.

(Via Lessig Blog)

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