They're striking against return to office? I work from home and value it but it never would occur to me to strike for that. I view it as a privilege and not a right. Almost everyone in the world has to go on location for their jobs. I am curious why it is so important to NYT workers in particular that they would strike over it - is there something particularly bad about the location?
> They're striking against return to office? I work from home and value it but it never would occur to me to strike for that. I view it as a privilege and not a right
Meanwhile in the early 20th century:
> They're striking over a weekend? I work five days a week and value it but it never would occur to me to strike for that. I view it as a privilege and not a right
Like, this is generally how it goes; workers' rights are generally won, not granted by divine authority.
In the United States, Philadelphia carpenters went on strike in 1791 for the ten-hour day. By the 1830s, this had become a general demand. In 1835, workers in Philadelphia organised the 1835 Philadelphia general strike, the first general strike in North America, led by Irish coal heavers. Their banners read, From 6 to 6, ten hours work and two hours for meals.[37] Labor movement publications called for an eight-hour day as early as 1836. Boston ship carpenters, although not unionized, achieved an eight-hour day in 1842.
Except it didn't exactly work out like that, companies were constantly looking for loopholes to avoid it and it didn't become normalized until the Henry Ford did it voluntarily for capitalist reasons and it payed off.
It is one of the many things they strike against, and I imagine it's not the most important issue and they are willing to compromise on.
Also a reminder that just a few years ago, CEOs thought remote work was good, everyone was productive, and they didn't see how they wanted to force everybody back. No, it's not a privilege, it's just how you get work done.
If enough people fight for the recognition of their need and desire to work from home, enough to enshrine it in some legal norms or at least in widely accepted and expected practices in the industry, WFH may become a right. This is how 40-hour work weeks became a right, or collective bargaining became a right, etc.
It became a standard in the US, but is not a right. And while the idea of the 40-hour work week did, indeed, come from labour groups, it was the Great Depression needing effort to try and compel businesses to hire more workers, not the fight of workers, that pushed to see it become a standard.
A wage is debt, so not beneficial in and of itself. It can be beneficial when you call the debt and turn it into something tangible (e.g. food), of course, but that is also of benefit to the business who derives joy in giving you that food. It is not for the benefit of workers. It is for the benefit of everyone.
One of the things they're striking against is arbitrary return to office mandates. Why did you leave off two words that change the nature of what they're fighting for?
Other folks have already pointed out the "rights" unions have fought for that we take for granted today. On top of that, being in a union is about solidarity with your fellow workers. You can support your coworkers' who need or just want to work from home. This should be easy, since it would affect you in approximately zero ways. They'll have your back for fighting for Just Cause protections.
> One of the things they're striking against is arbitrary return to office mandates.
If it is arbitrary, why is the NYT seemingly standing firm on the issue? As the article tells, NYT have agreed to a seven month grace period to give workers a chance to get their houses in order. That is not indicative of an arbitrary move.
Perhaps you mean they are striking against mandates that are motivated by undisclosed reasons?
If it is arbitrary, why is the NYT seemingly standing firm on the issue?
You'll have to ask NYT management if you're curious why they're doing something. I can venture a guess though. A lot of companies use RTO mandates as a way to avoid layoffs (and the negative press and severance requirements that come with them). This seems to go hand in hand with the demand for "just cause".
As the article tells, NYT have agreed to a seven month grace period to give workers a chance to get their houses in order. That is not indicative of an arbitrary move.
> You'll have to ask NYT management if you're curious why they're doing something.
I don't have to ask them anything if they are truly doing it arbitrarily. That's the answer.
But the question is if you are confusing "arbitrary" with "not knowing". Which is I guess I am to take that the answer is yes, that you are confused, since you admit to not knowing – which means you can't know that it is arbitrary.
How did you end up so confused?
> This doesn't follow.
If it is arbitrary, why not institute it today on a whim (strike notwithstanding)? Why wait? This indicates that there is planning involved, which suggests that it isn't arbitrary. It does not prove it without a doubt, but when playing the odds…
> Almost everyone in the world has to go on location for their jobs
I think it's fair to point out that progressive worker rights acquisition would initially always be a small case minority context (vs the vast majority that would lack those rights).
In the distant past almost everyone in the world lacked xyz worker rights.
I would totally join a strike against RTO if I were in a union or if someone organized one in response. The only other option for me would be to quit and look for another remote job.
I'm not going back to having to bring earmuffs and blast music all day just to have any hope of getting anything done, I'm not starting a commute, and I'm not sacrificing lunches with my kids for some executive's opinion about how I ought to collaborate most effectively.
Have you got a family? How long is your commute? What did you (and your family) gain from the move to WFH? Speaking for myself I gained over two hours of free time a day and a lot less stress from traffic. I wouldn't mind so much if my office was in walking or cycling distance, but living where you work is rare in this field.
> I work from home and value it but it never would occur to me to strike for that.
I believe that the value from WFH varies a lot from person to person.
If you were working from the office before and the company changed to a WFH policy, you might see it as a nice to have. You already made some life choices to accommodate going to the office. Maybe you even go to the office anyway.
But, if you were hired when the company already had WFH, you probably made some life choices based on that (buying a house far away from the city, having kids, not buying a car,...). In that case, mandatory RTO is a complete disaster (especially with the housing crisis) and you pretty much have no option other than resigning.
I assume NYT was doing WFH since ~2020, so a lot of employees probably took decisions based on WFH, therefore the strikes.
> I am curious why it is so important to NYT workers in particular that they would strike over it - is there something particularly bad about the location?
You're aware that NYC is an extremely expensive place to live, right?
If the government does not wish to be subject to corporate content moderation perhaps they should publish their social posts on their own platform.
I still think it is ridiculous that public safety notices are frequently distributed exclusively on Twitter now. During the pandemic my city was publishing curfew announcements solely on Twitter - not being a Twitter user, I only heard of them through word of mouth.
Archivebox and its companion browser plugin can also accomplish the capability of archiving everything you visit and may be of interest
https://archivebox.io/
I started believing in unit tests the day I finished my patch, ran the program and watched it work perfectly. I then grudgingly wrote a test, ran it and immediately observed it fail. One of the test inputs was some garbage input and that exposed a poorly written error handling path. Humbling!
I still hate writing them and it grates on my aesthetic sense to structure code with consideration to making it testable, but if we want to call ourselves engineers we need to hold ourselves to engineering standards. Bridge builders do not get to skip tests.
If you have worked in places where safety is critical, you wouldn’t say something so shallow. In those places they place human verification above all else. They have a thick book where you do a full run and is double checked, they don’t f around with unit tests and say this is good to go
I don't think anyone is saying unit tests and you are good to go are they?
In any critical system work, there are multiple layers and you can't really skip any of them.
It's also sort of meaningless to talk about such testing without requirements and spec to test against. Traceability is as much a part of it as any of the testing.
By the time you get to the "thick book/full run" as you put it, there has typically been a metric crapload of testing done already.
For all the testing and paperwork, the code in safety critical applications is still frequently awful and riddled with bugs, following such a process does not actually guarantee good software, it mostly just means you need a lot of paper pushers.
Human verification is very expensive, compared to unit tests. It costs money to pay that human to do it, time for them to test it, time to describe issues found, time to send it back for a fix.
Unit tests - actually, all automated tests - are comparatively cheap. The developer can run them immediately.
All code will have bugs. The "trick" to building a productive development pipeline is to catch as many of those bugs as possible as early as possible, and thereby reduce both the temporal and monetary cost of resolving them.
Interesting take. I find structuring code to be testable to make the code much clearer: mainly, by making dependencies explicit via dependency injection. I do that even if I don’t end up testing the code.
I have an identical experience. What really made me understand dependency injection (in Java) was being forced to write 100% code coverage unit tests. To be clear: 100% code coverage was absolutely overkill for my domain, but it was a lesson about how to structure your code for dependency injection.
I work on a team with 75% of the developers don't write any tests. You never know what you're going to run into. Did I cause a new bug, or did I discover an old one? It's embarrassing when you discover completely non-working code paths.
I'm not even looking for a particularly high level of test coverage, just a basic "I wrote an API, here's a test (integration, unit, doesn't matter) for the happy path"-level of coverage would be great.
On the opposite end, I worked at places that wanted unit tests for every new function, even if it was something simple (like a getter or setter) used elsewhere. That's also terrible.
A huge benefit of tests is their regression protection against future changes, often by other engineers. You don’t get that from ad hoc manual execution.
This. I like tests because it's hard to know if I accidentally broke something other than the thing I'm working on. Even software of modest size is at a level of complexity beyond what a human can QA in a reasonable amount of time for every revision. If you're at the point of needing a checklist with even 3 items on it, you're past the point of needing tests.
CPU cycles are so cheap these days that this is a gross waste of manpower.
Even better than manually written unit tests are automatically generated property-based tests (which can be unit or integration tests). One can literally run millions of tests in a day this way, far, FAR more than could ever be manually verified. All because computation is so darned cheap now.
