January 14, 2022

Hiring

We finished a hiring round for a Developer I. Two things that were different:

we were open to US applicants in Pacific, Mountain, Central, and Eastern timezones (last time we excluded Pacific).
we implemented a Rooney Rule for our interview stage.

I think both went well. Our applicant and interview pool was strong.

Union election delays

Aaron Sojourner asked me if I had the distribution of the delays between when workers ask the NLRB for an election and the election being held.

I put together a Observable notebook to answer that.

After I put together the initial histogram, I decided to look at it by year. I’m glad I did because there was a pretty big change in 2015 due to Obama era rule changes to shorten delays. h/t Dave Kamper.

I used a bit of code from Ben Welsh to add a download data link as spreadsheet (csv) to the notebook. I’d like to do this for everything going forward.

Notices of initial bargaining

I submitted a FOIA for notices of initial bargaining filed with the FMCS.

This FOIA may be helpful in identifying voluntary recognitions and other union formations occuring outside of the NLRB. I suspect that the voluntary recognition notices filed to the NLRB are a partial picture.

@UnionElections sent me a list of voluntary recognitions that he had compiled. When I get the Q4 2022 voluntary recognition data from the NLRB, I want to compare the two lists and see what kind of differences there are.

Gardening

We secure the same 25 x 15 plot we had last year. Some friends are going to split the plot with us, which I’m excited about. Last year, almost nothing we direct sowed came up, so that’s something I want to read about.

Managing meetings

The first two weeks of January had too many meetings. I’d like to build a little github action app that sets a budget of the number of hours of meetings i can be schedule for during a week by hooking into the Calendly and Google Calendar APIs. Sounds like a yak i shouldn’t shave, but I might.

Chicago Journalist Association Award