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Genuine question: what prevents the NYT from offshoring these jobs if they can be done from home? I feel for you, as a fellow worker, but unless there is someth

Genuine question: what prevents the NYT from offshoring these jobs if they can be done from home? I feel for you, as a fellow worker, but unless there is something hyper-local about the job such as regulatory requirements or trust issues with IP protection, the jobs will go to the ones who work hard without complaining too much.

marricks 2y ago
> “Work hard without complaining” 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.
- richwater 2y ago
  > I think the answer to that is a strong union able to bring down the website Unions cannot cause intentional or malicious destruction of their workplace. https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/01/politics/labor-strike-supreme-court-cement-company-glacier-teamsters/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/01/politics/labor-strike-supreme...
  - ceejayoz 2y ago
    That was clearly intended to permanently damage/destroy the equipment. 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.
    - ericd 2y ago
      If your highly cacheable, almost entirely static news site goes out when no one is touching anything, that's pretty suspect.
      - ceejayoz 2y ago
        I suspect you underestimate the complexity of the NYT site and keeping it running. Especially with a huge election tomorrow.
        ericd 2y ago
        Just saying, if it's built acceptably well, it shouldn't require engineers putting out fires constantly to not go down. But I'm sure you're right that I'm underestimating the complexity of the system as it's been constructed. And I guess it's not the case that no one is touching anything, it's being updated constantly.
        ceejayoz 2y ago
        In particular, tomorrow night is going to have a lot of things needing rapid tweaking; some random county in Missouri is gonna somehow have an emoji in their election count CSV because someone hit the wrong key, some new microservice will choke under the once-every-four-years load, etc.
  - marricks 2y ago
    I see how you could think that based on my phrasing, but presumably they have jobs because they do important work. I didn't meant to imply they would or should sabotage anything.
burkaman 2y ago
It is very beneficial for the newspaper to have them working eastern timezone hours (frequent meetings with NYC-based staff and deadlines driven by daily publishing schedule), and be familiar with the subject matter they are working on. They aren't reporters but they are still part of the reporting team and it will significantly slow things down for everyone if they don't know or care about the news.
lolinder 2y ago
Not OP, but I work in a company that is fully remote with a mix of offshore and onshore. 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.
- vijucat 2y ago
  Great list! All make sense to me.
- fastball 2y ago
  For (2), this is why you are seeing more and more off-shoring from the US to South America.
  - lolinder 2y ago
    Yeah, but that doesn't solve any of the other problems.
surgical_fire 2y ago
Offshoring is nothing new. Has been tried for decades, with multiple degrees of failure.
- randomdata 2y ago
  It seems they failed either because: 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.
  - more_corn 2y ago
    Cultural problems, communication problems, leadership problems. 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.
    - vijucat 2y ago
      > 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!
  - surgical_fire 2y ago
    I worked both as an offshore contractor, and as part of a team with offshore members. I can ensure that #1 is bullshit. You can have the whole offshore team in an office butts in seats all day and meet with failure. Happened many times in the past. #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.
BobaFloutist 2y ago
I think if they did that and the union made a big enough stink, customers would potentially riot.
tsunamifury 2y ago
Time zone requirements will destroy your retention.
consteval 2y ago
It's fairly difficult to do American news, centered around American politics and American culture, from not-America. This, at least, applies to editors and journalists. But for tech, I'd imagine they need quite a bit of context too.
- AdamN 2y ago
  Also the tech team at NYT is co-innovating with the business and journalism sides. Their work is highly ambiguous and changing year to year as they move their capabilities forward. That can't be outsourced or it undermines the strategy. NYT could build that capacity over time in another location that's cheaper but it would still need to be tightly integrated (i.e. employees).
- cloverich 2y ago
  Thats actually a big separator between quality tech companies and lower tier ones ime. Lower tier ones treat devs as a cost center and code monkeys. Higher quality ones treat them as a value generator and expect them to know about and engage with the business. Its what lets them work with more autonomy and intuition to ship the stuff people need most, that generates the most value.
Devasta 2y ago
There is nothing about the shitty office cube farm that imbues magic anti-offshoring properties to your job.
heraldgeezer 2y ago
I have seen this before and it hit me. What is the point? 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)
- freeone3000 2y ago
  Yes! Outsourced HR has been a thing for a while, the same as IT or customer support. Offshoring the dev team makes sense, and offshoring of lower management has started, because it’s just easier if they’re in the same timezone as their team. Obviously senior management is too important to be replaced, for now. 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?
- mrguyorama 2y ago
  The purpose, point, goal, and desire of a company, which in real terms means the people who work in the C-Suite and make all the choices, is to make as much money as possible. They have no loyalties, it's more profitable that way. 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.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
keybored 2y ago
There are already places with Internet access that can work for cheaper than people that live in the NY area. For a long time now. Clearly there are more variables at play here. Or else the local NYT employees could be the most subservient and diligent workers ever: they would still get replaced by the cheaper offshore labor eventually. 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.
- randomdata 2y ago
  > There are already places with Internet access that can work for cheaper than people that live in the NY area. 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.
gaws 2y ago
> what prevents the NYT from offshoring these jobs if they can be done from home? Cheaper and submissive labor doesn't result in high-quality products.

marricks 2y ago

> “Work hard without complaining” 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.

richwater 2y ago
> I think the answer to that is a strong union able to bring down the website Unions cannot cause intentional or malicious destruction of their workplace. https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/01/politics/labor-strike-supreme-court-cement-company-glacier-teamsters/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/01/politics/labor-strike-supreme...
- ceejayoz 2y ago
  That was clearly intended to permanently damage/destroy the equipment. 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.
  - ericd 2y ago
    If your highly cacheable, almost entirely static news site goes out when no one is touching anything, that's pretty suspect.
    - ceejayoz 2y ago
      I suspect you underestimate the complexity of the NYT site and keeping it running. Especially with a huge election tomorrow.
      - ericd 2y ago
        Just saying, if it's built acceptably well, it shouldn't require engineers putting out fires constantly to not go down. But I'm sure you're right that I'm underestimating the complexity of the system as it's been constructed. And I guess it's not the case that no one is touching anything, it's being updated constantly.
        ceejayoz 2y ago
        In particular, tomorrow night is going to have a lot of things needing rapid tweaking; some random county in Missouri is gonna somehow have an emoji in their election count CSV because someone hit the wrong key, some new microservice will choke under the once-every-four-years load, etc.
- marricks 2y ago
  I see how you could think that based on my phrasing, but presumably they have jobs because they do important work. I didn't meant to imply they would or should sabotage anything.

burkaman 2y ago

It is very beneficial for the newspaper to have them working eastern timezone hours (frequent meetings with NYC-based staff and deadlines driven by daily publishing schedule), and be familiar with the subject matter they are working on. They aren't reporters but they are still part of the reporting team and it will significantly slow things down for everyone if they don't know or care about the news.

lolinder 2y ago

Not OP, but I work in a company that is fully remote with a mix of offshore and onshore. 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.

vijucat 2y ago
Great list! All make sense to me.
fastball 2y ago
For (2), this is why you are seeing more and more off-shoring from the US to South America.
- lolinder 2y ago
  Yeah, but that doesn't solve any of the other problems.

surgical_fire 2y ago

Offshoring is nothing new. Has been tried for decades, with multiple degrees of failure.

randomdata 2y ago
It seems they failed either because: 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.
- more_corn 2y ago
  Cultural problems, communication problems, leadership problems. 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.
  - vijucat 2y ago
    > 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!
- surgical_fire 2y ago
  I worked both as an offshore contractor, and as part of a team with offshore members. I can ensure that #1 is bullshit. You can have the whole offshore team in an office butts in seats all day and meet with failure. Happened many times in the past. #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.

BobaFloutist 2y ago

I think if they did that and the union made a big enough stink, customers would potentially riot.

tsunamifury 2y ago

Time zone requirements will destroy your retention.

consteval 2y ago

It's fairly difficult to do American news, centered around American politics and American culture, from not-America. This, at least, applies to editors and journalists. But for tech, I'd imagine they need quite a bit of context too.

AdamN 2y ago
Also the tech team at NYT is co-innovating with the business and journalism sides. Their work is highly ambiguous and changing year to year as they move their capabilities forward. That can't be outsourced or it undermines the strategy. NYT could build that capacity over time in another location that's cheaper but it would still need to be tightly integrated (i.e. employees).
cloverich 2y ago
Thats actually a big separator between quality tech companies and lower tier ones ime. Lower tier ones treat devs as a cost center and code monkeys. Higher quality ones treat them as a value generator and expect them to know about and engage with the business. Its what lets them work with more autonomy and intuition to ship the stuff people need most, that generates the most value.

Devasta 2y ago

There is nothing about the shitty office cube farm that imbues magic anti-offshoring properties to your job.

heraldgeezer 2y ago

I have seen this before and it hit me. What is the point? 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)

freeone3000 2y ago
Yes! Outsourced HR has been a thing for a while, the same as IT or customer support. Offshoring the dev team makes sense, and offshoring of lower management has started, because it’s just easier if they’re in the same timezone as their team. Obviously senior management is too important to be replaced, for now. 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?
mrguyorama 2y ago
The purpose, point, goal, and desire of a company, which in real terms means the people who work in the C-Suite and make all the choices, is to make as much money as possible. They have no loyalties, it's more profitable that way. 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.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

keybored 2y ago

There are already places with Internet access that can work for cheaper than people that live in the NY area. For a long time now. Clearly there are more variables at play here. Or else the local NYT employees could be the most subservient and diligent workers ever: they would still get replaced by the cheaper offshore labor eventually. 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.

randomdata 2y ago
> There are already places with Internet access that can work for cheaper than people that live in the NY area. 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.

gaws 2y ago

> what prevents the NYT from offshoring these jobs if they can be done from home? Cheaper and submissive labor doesn't result in high-quality products.