New York Times reviews

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.

Digital side is a highly individualistic atmosphere. Engineers are expected to make a name for themselves in hackathons, and I didn't observe sincere camaraderie between others or directed at me from any but a very few people during my time there. There is a culture of overdesign and a love of the status quo, which means you will spend most of your time trying to maintain ridiculously complex systems. Product decisions seem to be based on intuition rather than a careful analysis of data, which is perplexing due to the immensity of pageview and other usage data from the various platforms that is just lying around unused. The result is 200 engineers working on few know exactly what and having who knows what impact on the success of the business. In general, data analysis and data collection are not understood and not highly prioritized there. The workspace itself is gray, dark, lifeless and depressing. Insist on a tour of the floor if you get an onsite interview. There is no process (letter of warning, bad review, etc.) for termination. One day you will simply be informed your employment is over. I observed many totally unexpected terminations of hardworking and talented individuals and no explanation of any substance was ever provided. I've spoken with other former employees and the "ambush firing" is apparently standard practice there. So if you join the Times don't ever assume anything about the security of your job.