Daily Archives: November 4, 2024

New York Times tech union goes on strike one day before election

The New York Times Tech Guild, which represents hundreds of the outlet’s tech staff workers, went on strike Monday morning – one day before the US presidential election.The threat of a strike has existed within the company for months, raising questions over a potential disruption of election coverage. The newspaper giant confirmed in a statement that members would begin protesting outside the Times headquarters daily, beginning at 9am Monday.The walkout is a result of a 10 September vote where staff workers decided to go on strike at a critical time – election week – if an agreement wasn’t made. With the largest subscription base of any American newspaper, readers will be widely seeking extensive election coverage.The Tech Guild called the strike after increasingly intense negotiations between the guild and Times management failed to yield a contract agreement.Kait Hoehne, Times senior software engineer and Tech Guild member, said the group was hoping to avoid a strike as negotiations had continued into late Sunday night. But tech workers were ultimately left feeling they had no other option after the management’s failure to agree on key issues, the Washington Post reported.“We love our jobs, and we’re looking forward to being able to do them,” Hoehne told the Post. “But we haven’t seen enough movement from management, and we’ve been bargaining for far too long.”The Tech Guild’s roughly 600 members are in charge of operating the back-end systems that power the paper’s comprehensive digital operations. The strike could affect not only the paper’s ability to cover the presidential election between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump – but also the hundreds of House and dozens of Senate races across the US that will determine who will secure control of Washington in 2025.The strike could have an impact that reaches much further than just election coverage, however. The Tech Guild consists of software engineers, product managers, data analysts and designers that oversee several of the paper’s digital offerings, such as live-blogs, mobile push alerts, its iconic games and the famous election needle.“They have left us no choice but to demonstrate the power of our labor on the picket line,” Kathy Zhang, the guild’s unit chair, said in the statement according to the Times. “Nevertheless, we stand ready to bargain and get this contract across the finish line.”Hoehne told the Post that elections bring increased traffic to the website, which puts “stress on the system”. Without experienced engineers on hand to deal with the sudden surge of extra traffic, “teams can be [affected] in a big way,” she said.The Guild is asking that readers honor their picket line by boycotting the Times’ selection of games, including Wordle and the daily digital crossword, and to avoid other digital extensions such as the Cooking app.Annie Shields, a campaign lead for the News Guild of New York, encouraged people to sacrifice their streaks in the wildly popular Wordle and Connections games in order to support the strike.“Enjoy the archive today while you can!” she wrote in a post on X.

Washington DC Rises As A Tech Hub, Helped Along By The She-Economy

The knock against Washington DC as a tech hub has always been that it was too much of a government town: risk-averse, slow-moving, not worried enough about the bottom line.

But a lot has changed in the last 15 years, since people started trying to seed the culture of technology innovation outside Silicon Valley. Washington DC got a lot richer, for one thing.

Four of the 10 wealthiest counties in the country are in the DC metro area, as are the two very wealthiest – Falls Church and Loudon.

And the government itself became less and more powerful: The democracy grew weaker and the regulatory system in the hands of big companies that have captured much of it grew stronger. I took a look at my home-town ecosystem as part of a series looking at legacy cities and other second-tier markets.

Today, there is a tech hub growing in Washington, D.C., fueled by the wealth of the suburbs and partly built around that new government system. Pitchbook recently ranked the city 5th among startups, ahead of Austin and Seattle (and behind Silicon Valley, New York, Los Angles and Boston). Washington D.C. tech unicorns include ID.me and and Rebellion Defense (a military software provider), Pitchbook notes.

K Street Capital, which includes a $15 million venture fund and a $25 million fund of funds, invested in ID.me. Paige Soya, K Street’s managing partner, was a founder herself before beginning a career as an investor. There’s a lively debate now about whether DC is a “tier-one” city, she said. Whether it is or not, it’s on the rise, she notes.
“Government is increasingly a player in all these spaces,” she said. Part of K Street’s value proposition is helping small companies and startups gain a foothold in regulated industries where a giant may dominate the space and regulators’ attention. National security, finance and public affairs are three industries where a presence in DC or a connection to the city is a huge advantage.

Increased Role of Government An Opportunity For Some Paige Soya, managing partner of K Street Capital K Street Capital

A recent fintech pitch event packed a room in the International Square with informed-sounding investors listening to pitches about companies including Wellthi, founded by Fonta Gilliam. The company embeds content and social connectivity inside existing banks’ apps and advertises partnerships with Zendesk, Sutton Bank and Visa on its web site.

Selena Strandburg, founder of The Know, an enterprise software company that supplies the public affairs teams at big companies understand how to respond to global news events, came to Washington, D.C. in 2019 to work on a company that worked on civic involvement. It led to The Know, which she founded in 2022. It’s raised more than $1 million and has a team of four.
Anecdotal evidence suggests that women are playing more of a role in Washington, D.C. than in other tech hubs, perhaps part of the she-economy that Mimi Montgomery of Axios wrote about last spring. Overall, the world of venture-backed tech companies remains shockingly dominated by men, with less than 3% of venture capital going to companies founded by women. (That number hasn’t budged in decades, and is about the same in the United States and Europe.). Women entrepreneurs and venture capitalists still face deep-seated cultural biases that have proven difficult to dislodge. If you needed more evidence of this, consider that women entrepreneurs who raise money from women venture capitalists have a harder time getting following rounds. As other industries are, venture capital is increasingly dominated by large firms that set the rules of the road: most of those are in turn dominated by a culture that heavily favors male leadership styles.
But The Statistics Don’t Tell The Whole Story
Though the statistics reflect the largest deals, which almost always involve male-founded companies, I see women in technology moving forward, mostly ignoring the obstacles and creating their own successes and definitions of success. For instance, women entrepreneurs are more likely to get funding if they say they are operating social enterprises – Wellthi identifies itself as one. Strandburg said she was motivated to become an entrepreneur after she noticed how much easier it was to make an impact in the world through companies.
And women continue to invest in other women.
At K Street Capital, about 25% of the investors are women, Soya said. About 35-40% of the companies it invests in across the company are women-led. “For some reason, DC has a more egalitarian culture,” Soya said.
Strandburg echoed that assessment, and said in her industry – public affairs and communications – she has found it to be an advantage to be a woman. “I have deep empathy for executives who make very challenging decisions impact thousands of employees’ lives,” she said. “Starting with empathy helps me solve the problems that literally keep customers up at night.”
Though, there are still parts of the DC tech scene that are almost entirely male-dominated, including national security. Mollie Breen, founder of Perygee, The company supplies no-code tools that help companies automate processes, including in the IT and security fields. Breen, a mathematician who worked at the NSA, said she is rarely the only woman in the room when founders or others from her industry. “But there are usually only a couple of us,” she said.

Westinghouse’s Elias Gedeon: United States Supports Bulgaria’s Energy Security

The United States has always supported Bulgaria in ensuring its energy security, Elias Gedeon from Westinghouse Electric Company said at the signing ceremony for an engineering contract for new nuclear facilities at Site No. 2 of the Kozloduy Nuclear Power Plant, held at the Council of Ministers building on Monday. The agreement was signed between NPP Kozloduy New Builds, the Westinghouse and Hyundai Consortium, and Hyundai Engineering & Construction.
This event marks an important milestone in the construction of new facilities at Kozloduy NPP, Gedeon said. He added that the United States has always supported Bulgaria in securing its energy security and diversifying energy sources, including this project. He also said that the construction of two reactors with advanced technologies will provide reliable and secure energy for Bulgaria. The Westinghouse representative stressed that the project’s implementation will position Bulgaria as a central energy source.
/DT/

Hispanic tech workers more than double representation in key US cities

This piece is also available in Spanish, thanks to translation services by Gabriela Rivera, digital communications manager at Resolve Philly.The number of tech jobs continues to rise — but will the number of Hispanic tech workers grow, too?The US Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that tech jobs, defined as occupations in computer and information technology, will grow by 13% by 2030. That makes it the country’s fastest-growing sector. However, data shows Hispanic people are wildly underrepresented. In some US cities, fewer than 5% of tech workers are Hispanic. This stems partly from lack of access to tech at a young age, and to workforce development resources.“Increasing Hispanic representation in tech is not just a matter of equity, but also of economic necessity,” Ronaldo Tello, president and CEO of the Delaware Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, told Technical.ly. “As [the] tech sector continues to grow, ensuring that our Hispanic community is well-represented will be crucial for innovation and economic growth.”Using Technical.ly’s Tech Economy Dashboard powered by Lightcast (please ask if you want direct access), we looked at the demographics of five metro regions: Atlanta, Baltimore, DC, Philadelphia and Pittsburgh.Here are the percentages of people who identified as Hispanic in these cities in 2022:• Atlanta: 6%• Baltimore: 8%• DC: 11% • Philadelphia: 16%• Pittsburgh: 4%All of these cities have seen some growth in their Hispanic population over the last decade. Atlanta and DC saw modest growth from 5% and 9%, respectively, while Baltimore doubled its Hispanic population from 4% to 8%, and Pittsburgh’s population grew by 80%. Philadelphia’s Hispanic population is also growing quickly, up from 13% in 2010.For context, throughout the United States, between the census years of 2010 and 2020, the American Hispanic population grew by more than 11 million people. That’s about 19% of the US population, the second-highest demographic group in the US after non-Hispanic white.Are Hispanic tech jobs keeping up with population growth?In most of the cities we looked at, the number of Hispanic people in tech jobs is not keeping up with the increase in the Hispanic populationOur data also shows that cities with smaller Hispanic populations of around 5% tend to be closer to the proportional representation of Hispanic people in tech jobs. Atlanta shows a 5% Hispanic tech workforce, and Pittsburgh, while it has the fewest number of Hispanic tech workers in the dataset at 3.5%, comes proportionately close to its 4% Hispanic population. Philadelphia, with 4% Hispanic tech workers, has a relatively large 12-point difference. DC, with 6%, shows a Hispanic tech workforce that is proportionately about half its Hispanic population, and Baltimore, with 4%, shows a similar gap.The data shows that Hispanic workers are still underrepresented in tech, but in nearly all of the markets we looked at, the number of Hispanic tech workforce increased over the last decade.Why the Hispanic tech worker numbers are trickyOne thing that has to be taken into consideration with any analysis of data on the United States Hispanic population is that, for various reasons, the numbers are often inaccurate. This is partly because of data collection methods, and the fact that being Hispanic is not considered a race, but an ethnicity. Through 2020, the US Census asked two demographic questions: One on whether the census-taker is Hispanic, and one asking the census-taker’s race. That left Hispanic census takers with a choice of white, Black, Asian, American Indian, Pacific Islander or some other race (SOR), and, for some Hispanic census takers, none of these options were a fit.In an April 2024 op-ed in the Los Angeles Loyolan, opinion editor Mateo-Luis Planas wrote about his multiracial Hispanic identity and the problem with choosing SOR. “According to federal guidelines, ‘other’ is not a race,” he wrote. “As a result, almost 44% of the Latine respondents who chose that option in 2020 would have their race assigned to them — and it’s no surprise that the majority of them were categorized as white.”It’s also been found that a number of Hispanic Americans skipped the race question altogether, or don’t respond to the census at all. Plus, the difference between the definitions of “Hispanic” and “Latino” can make a difference in reporting, too. Hispanic refers to a person with heritage from a country that primarily speaks Spanish, while Latino refers to someone with origins in Latin America. 

With such complexities at play, plus insecurities due to the political climate, the Brennan Center for Justice found that the US Hispanic population was undercounted in 2020 by about 5%. That’s a significant gap that could undercut resources in communities with large Hispanic populations, including funding for Medicaid, SNAP and education.In response, the Census Bureau announced in March that it was revising how it collected demographic data, including a change that would put Hispanics in the same category as racial identities like white, Black, and Asian, under “Race or Ethnicity.” Starting in 2030, census takers can continue to give more detailed answers noting their country or territory of origin.Still, a demographic undercount is only part of the reason for the disproportionate data on Hispanic tech workers. Back in 2014, industry watchers noted that a lack of access to new technology in the 1990s and 2000s contributed to the gap, as well as a lack of resources. As resources for underrepresented people in tech workforce development programs have increased, there has been an increase in Hispanic tech workers in some cities, but a slowly closing gap remains.Closing those gaps may take more resources, a better system of counting different demographics, or a bit of both.“We hope that by shedding light on these challenges,” Tello said, “we can inspire more action and collaboration to create a more inclusive tech workforce.”

Sysdyne Technologies and Giatec Unite in Strategic Partnership to Innovate Concrete Production

Sysdyne Technologies and Giatec Unite in Strategic Partnership to Innovate Concrete Production – Technology Today – EIN Presswire