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If all you rascals have any questions — feel free to ask. The "militaristic fervor" isn't quite yet in effect here this early in the morning...
1. Has the NYT dev team started moving more towards Go? Or towards JS/Node. Or Python? Or is there no consensus (nor any need for one)?

2. What's Maureen Dowd's opinion on CoffeeScript vs JavaScript?

1. There are many different teams of "devs" that each do their own thing ... but as far as I'm aware — The main site is still mostly PHP and Java, with perhaps a bit of Node and Go here and there. The iOS folks, are naturally Objective-C, and the Android folks are Java. Interactive News is Rails and Node, with a touch of Haskell whenever Hinton throws it in the mix ;) Graphics is as static as possible, with Node tools for pre-building and pre-baking.

2. As you can read for yourself here: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/04/opinion/dowd-dont-harsh-ou... ... Maureen Dowd is clearly down with groovy, far-out technologies of the mind-expanding sort.

We've been using Go in production on our proprietary email platform for a couple years now for daemon services, web APIs and EMR jobs[1]. A few other teams have also picked up the language and are building out new systems to support comments, mobile and I think a maybe a few other pieces of the site.

Go is definitely not our only tool in the box and many teams (including mine) still use Python, C++ or whatever works best for the job at hand, but I think there definitely is a trend of Go being the choice for a lot of new server side systems.

[1] http://open.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/07/10/emr-streaming-in-go...

With regard to languages, there's a real mix. PHP is still probably the most widely used language (including on the main desktop site, and our blogs are powered by Wordpress), but the mobile site runs on Node, and Go is definitely being used in the building.
This is a little off-track, and possibly you can't answer this question - have you met any of the NYT columnists? What are your personal impressions of them and how they interact?

I've always been a little interested since clearly sometimes they target their columns at each other.

I'm afraid I can't help you out there. I'm down in the newsroom, and there's a "church and state" separation between news and opinion. We only work together on rare occasions.
I'm actually glad to hear that.
I strongly considered going the route of journalist-developer after graduation but couldn't really get any information. Seemed like all the opportunities were with Buzzfeed and their ilk and while they may occasionally flirt with good journalism overall I'd rather work for BigCorp. Still I think I'd love to do this kind of work. Anyone have details about pay or places hiring?
NYT is the big guy in the space but there's actually a lot of action right now, with the Post, Vox, and some big traditional organizations like AP doubling down on it over the past few years.

Pay is generally in the 'low for a professional developer but reasonable' zone. The hours and work environments tend to be rough, as the news makes its own hours and the media industry in general doesn't have the experience with good project/product management that you'd expect at a tech company. On the other hand the work is super cool, and it's always fun to see your projects exposed to millions of people. There's also a very guerrilla spirit among the journo tech people that I've met that's really fun to be around. As projects are often time-sensitive one-offs, there's also a lot more experimentation with new tech than you'll find elsewhere.

If you're interested in the field look at the stuff Nicar and the Knight Foundation do, and look to see if your town has a local hackshackers meetup group.

I'm definitely going to look into this now. I did some work for a journalism class that was funded by the Knight Foundation so not sure why it never occurred to me to look into them further. Thanks
No prob. Not sure what your exact skills are but anybody with even basic data scraping/munging/analysis skills, and any data visualization stuff (especially d3 knowledge) is super employable valuable right now.

There probably aren't that many spots in raw numbers, but I think the right candidate wouldn't have too hard a time getting picked up somewhere.

The author [necessarily] glazed over the more interesting features of the building:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_York_Times_Building#Sus...

For a new skyscraper built in 2007 especially for the needs of the New York Times, the "one page meeting" conference room seems very small: http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/g1874/behind-the-...

The projector is also pointing towards the window to a small screen. This room seems like an afterthought.

Not mentioned in the wikipedia article: There are no trash cans in the lunchroom because Renzo Piano apparently hates them. Instead, weird conveyer belt tray thing.
I agree with him, to be honest...especially in a lunch room. They get grimy unless the staff is meticulous about keeping them clean and they have to be constantly monitored so that they don't get over-filled. Also, changing the bags is unsightly, especially when people are eating nearby.

This is just scratching the surface of all the potential arguments against them.

i see what you did there
I read the NYT daily (via RSS feeds). It is an important institution for the U.S. and the world; the options are rapidly shrinking for high-quality journalism and so I worry about the Times' future. From my perspective the Times' content is invaluable, but in 2015 the Times is hurting itself because it still hasn't embraced the web. www.nytimes.com is still a newspaper's website, not a news website. When I'm looking for news in my browser, I don't care that you have a paper edition, I only care which website serves me best.

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1) Design: Look at the homepage. If someone was asked to design a new news (not a newspaper) website, who would design it like that? Rather than a news website it looks like a newspaper on the web, seemingly trying to mimic the layout of a newspaper's pages. (It's not just the Times -- often it's easy to identify news websites with a newspaper legacy.) From the perspective of people familiar with the Times on paper, it might seem familiar; but get outside that bubble and it's archaic and a bit bizarre.[1]

Also, it hides so much content; why put all that talent and effort into work product that you show only to a few? My NYT RSS feeds look like a different, far richer publication than http://www.nytimes.com/. Again, it seems like attachment to the legacy newspaper design, where people can't easily pick up another publication and so will flip through Times' pages and sections looking for something interesting. The overall structure is a newspaper's sections forced into a website's medium.

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2) Multimedia is still secondary: Articles still are primarily text, but now more often with video and image bolted on almost as decoration, and not an integral part of the content, equal to the text. See today's article on Tomi Ungerer[2], chosen at random. This is about a visual artist, and it actually has several images within the text, rather than on top or in a pop-out, but the images are merely decorative. The author doesn't write, 'look at this drawing; see the use of color, the ironic shapes, etc.' and look at this detail <img: zoomed-in detail> where Mr. Ungerer uses X to do Y' It's almost as if the the author wrote the article and someone else picked some relevant decorations later.

There's even a link in prime real estate, just beneath the banner, to "Video", as if I choose my news based on whether it's in text or video. As if you are saying, 'our actual news is below, and video is something we do over here'. I just want the news; I trust you to choose the best mix of mediums to communicate that particular story.

The solution is well known: Most amateur bloggers are equally fluent in text and multimedia; rather than describing something they write 'look at this' or 'here's what happened' or 'here is the before and after' and, in the middle of their post place a video, image, or short loop as appropriate. Hundreds of millions of phone users fluently communicate with images and photos. But the talented, professional communicators at the Times stick primarily to text, I suppose because that's what they did on paper.

I'm not looking for graphic excitement; they are just communication tools and sometimes multimedia is the right tool, sometimes text is; the Times seems to choose its tools based on paper's limitations (i.e., text is cheap, images expensive in both space and $, video impossible) and not what communicates best on the web (where all are cheap and space is unlimited).

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3) Updates and the news cycle: Two things I still see in the Times: A) 'Updated at 4:55pm'. If I read the article at 3:00pm, that isn't very helpful; should I re-read the entire thing and try to figure out what changed? Run a diff? Again, the solutions are well known and most bloggers handle this situation effectively; the Times still seems to be designing newspaper articles that will be published and read once. B) When you do have someone blogging a breaking news story, sometimes I'll see 'That's it for tonight, I'll be back at 8am tomorrow'. I don't have to explain the problems with that, though I'll add that the news and your readers are in time zones worldwide.

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[1] This will be shocking to say but I'm trying to make a point about how far the Times is, conceptually, from the web medium: Consider the most recognized branding element, the detailed, archaic font used for "The New York Times", in the banner. In the days of newspapers, when readers could only type in Courier if at all, the font was special. It said, 'this was printed professionally, with skill and seriousness'. Now kids can print fonts like that on their school papers, anyone can do it on their WordPress blog, and when they do it's frowned upon. Now that element says, 'not a digital native, stuck in our glorious past'. Again, it's hard to imagine a newly created news website making that design decision. You may have a strong attachment to that design element, but billions of web users don't care. (I know branding is difficult to change; I expect the font will remain.)

[2] http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/13/arts/design/review-tomi-un...

Former NYT journalist here.

You make some really good points. The NYT is trying hard to embrace the Web, and it's done a better job than a lot of newspapers, but it faces certain limitations.

That said, a lot of the activity in the newsroom is still tied to the daily rhythm of putting out newspapers.

Digital ad revenue only accounts for about 30% of the paper's total ad revenue, which means that print still figures large:

http://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/243057/nytco-t...

While the NYT's profit declined by about 40% from 2013 to 2014, from $156M to $92M, it is still a profitable company, and much of that profit comes from print. It's very hard for a company to wean itself from a profit center, especially when it's not clear how profitable it will be on the digital side.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/04/business/new-york-times-co...