New York Times Software Engineer Reviews

Pros

Being in this building and walking through the newsroom just makes you feel like you are a part of something special. The history and the mission is meaningful, and it makes the job feel like it matters. Every one is very motivated by this.

Cons

Even as a software engineer, the amount of meetings you will have to go to is intense. It is sometimes hard to find any time to code. Sometimes you will have meetings on top of meetings. You will have to block off random chunks of time on your schedule so that you can code, but meetings will get booked into them regardless. Other cons are completely team dependent. But generally, if you are on a consumer facing news product team as an engineer, it may be tough. You will be surrounded by competitive, type A coworkers. Priorities are strange and engineers have no voice in the product. Product managers and designers run everything with a tight grip and no flexibility. All your deliverables exist to make them look good and they will ask for unnecessary things constantly. You will be micro managed to death and the politics of interacting with the product team will slowly wear you down. Relations between product and engineering are tense for this reason. Upper management seems to have no interest in remedying this and engineers leave constantly because of it.

Pros

Great work-life balance, lots of opportunities for growth. Investing a lot in tech

Cons

Not very flexible with hr-related stuff

Pros

- The mission. - Tech-wise, can sometimes feel start-up like. New projects are cloud-first (GCP) and most teams have moved to agile. Room for new ways of doing work and rethinking old approaches. - Decently large tech org with a depth of experience. - Lots of opportunity for growth and strong focus on learning. - Strong architecture review board. - Push for more regularization in languages, systems, and production quality. - There are some excellent managers in the organization who are committed to their employee's careers and growth. - Diversity initiatives appear to be having some affect in the tech organization.

Cons

- Feels enterprise-y in a lot of ways: culture-wise, a lot of the tech staff don't live in the City and many teams are incredibly siloed from each other; project-wise, things can move slowly and old projects live forever. - There's a lack of cohesiveness in the org: while engineering has started to move to a product model, Product & PM are still catching up; some teams lack development discipline; communication between teams can feel like pulling teeth. - Some parts of the tech org are understaffed. - Diversity continues to be a problem in the tech organization. - Relationship between the business and the newsroom is still weird.

Pros

Benefits Salary is competitive Remote work culture Relax work culture

Cons

For non immigrants, it’s not a right place to work. They have stupid policy of filing GC after 4 years working at NYT. If they don’t change policy in next few months, I am planning to leave so as many people will leave. Higher employee churn rate. Lot of employees are leaving New York Times. Technology side of the group is low invested. As a result, they are still using technology stack which is 20 years old.