In addition:
A thread from a former LMG-employee about abuse and insane working conditions:
Don’t wanna say I was expecting it but I was always kinda waiting for "something" to come out of ltt. A bunch of tech bros in their 30s still making penis and 69 jokes every video doesn’t seem like a good environment lmao
Yeah enough of their company culture had leaked into their videos and through some of the things Linus had said that I wasn't really that surprised to see that thread. The power imbalance was thrown around for jokes and Linus comes off as a stingy bastard who will spend a ton of money in some places and then complain about a relatively trivial expense elsewhere. And the way he talks about it implies that he thinks everyone sees it that way.
Thanks for sharing, this is absolutely INSANE. Far worse than everything pointed by GN.
GN sticks to tech news, and I respect that that Steve sticks to his area of expertise when it comes to reporting on issues in the tech field. LTT has repeatedly shown glaring errors in their testing, and that’s what was reported on by GN.
The staff and professional issues the company faces are for an entirely different style of journalism, and I do hope someone picks up that story.
Linus has always struck me as someone who would be kinda cool to be friends with, but the worst person to be your boss. He can be arrogant, dismissive of employee ideas, and penny pinching. I’ve seen it time and time again in videos where he participates, and it’s always rubbed me the wrong way. I only hope the people who faced discrimination and burnout at LTT are in better places now and have found ways to let their obvious expertise shine.
I also hope one of these employees can summon the strength to report LMG to the relevant Canadian authorities for their blatant abuse of their employees. No matter the “opportunities” and employer offers, or the “contracts” they make employees sign, workers have rights, and their should be a reckoning when those rights are violated.
Could you/anyone take a screenshot of the tweets for us non-twitter users?
Linus really doesn’t respond well to criticism. He’s trying to act like a sale and an auction are 2 different things? If some hardware vendor tried to feed him that excuse he’d devote a whole video to it! Hell, if someone had sold one of his screwdriver prototypes he’d probably have thrown a fit and sued (as is his right)!
He’s picking quantity of videos over quality, so stuff like this is only going to accelerate.
The obsession with the fact that GN didn’t reach out for lmg’s response to the story is extremely rich given that ltt didn’t give billet labs that exact same courtesy
I'm glad GN didn't reach out. Linus emailed Billet Labs 2 hours after the GN video with an offer to reimburse them for the prototype, so that he could claim that GN got their facts wrong. But we have the receipts!
That was the nail in the coffin, for me. Making mistakes is fine, even big ones. I understand that Youtube is the devil, and it's easy to fall into a trap of shoveling nonsense out onto the platform. I'm honestly sympathetic to that. If Linus said "You're right, quality has suffered cuz we've been going too fast. We need to take another look at this." I'd be completely happy.
But to lie -- not just by words, but by actions -- in order to cast doubt on the people who are trying to give you a reality check and get your work back on track... That's really bad.
Geez what a bunch of assholes
Well yeah, LTT has long gone fully corporate. This was a problem years ago already, it was just always weird seeing so many flock to their channel when it was clearly a rote production like a 15 years ongoing weekly crime drama, not an actual tech channel.
Their production value is often stellar, don't get me wrong. But that's it. That's all they have. It's all about optimizing the production to maximize ad revenue.
Imo, any large company, even if started hardcore by linus and luke (and co), will always in the end be mostly created by all the employees.
The ownership of any large company should imo always be gradually moved over to the people who work there.
Worker coops are not a silver bullet and will always be corruptible in any way any other democracy can, but at least it has the possibility to be proper, in contrast to strict founder / investor ownership where you are at their mercy.
I fully agree. But that's the thing, if you don't consider LTT as a tech channel anymore, like GN or whatever, it's fine. I now consider LTT as pure entertainment, I will never go to them to actually buy a PC or a tech product. For that I go to forums, I watch multiple reviews, etc. And if the production value is all they have, I'll just watch it like a show with actors that are - well - acting.
I'm not trying to defend LTT, what they did was shite and I feel that they should be held accountable. But let's compare apples with apples, LTT isn't a tech channel anymore.
This is how I feel about LTT too. There should never be one single location you go to for all your review needs - even if it had every single product in existence in for review.
I’ll look at LTT videos to see people doing dumb shit with tens of thousands of Britannian Monies worth of tech, sometimes there’s some genuinely good “hey, this exists” (see: PowerToys which gave me Spotlight on Windows), and sometimes it triggers a “hey I could use X, I’ll do my own research and collation of reviews”.
If they can get their Labs up and running and their tests being transparent enough that they can be peer reviewed, then Labs will be a tool in the toolbox, not the toolbox itself.
I'm not really that familiar with LTT. I did subscribe to his channel, mainly because I was bemused by him borking his PC by rushing an install of Pop_OS and Steam. ("yes, do as I say", if you recall). Reading the PC Gamer article, it appears he did the same, "just drive on without thinking it through" approach to this prototype cooler. I haven't watched a lot of his videos and anyone can make a mistake but, there is an expectation that a "tech expert" show a bit of diligence. Plus, if he's showcasing a vendor, he should make sure they have every chance to shine.
.
.....this guy is starting to look like a poser now....
imho, what's happened at LTT has a few separate root causes:
A focus on extremely high output that means poor-quality work and poor working environment.
Extreme unprofessionalism that works okay when you're a handful of guys who are close friends and all personally invested in the mission, but not when you're a big company with communication problems across the various working groups. This is normal growing pains when a company moves from "nimble start-up" into "big production", but Linus has been handling it really badly, and seems like a big part of the problem. Stepping back from the CEO role was a good first step but he's obviously still de-facto running the company.
I can't call Linus a poser since he and his team quite apparently know a massive amount about PC hardware, but the above factors mean they're going to make near-constant screw-ups, and now they're seeing real comeuppance from that.
edit: I just read the rest of the allegations on Xitter and holy shit this is worse than I thought. She really buried the lede. It's still "unprofessionalism" but a level of unprofessionalism that totally crosses the line far beyond normal growing pains. Flubbing workplace sexual harassment is a serious fuckup.
…this guy is starting to look like a poser now…
Not starting, always has been
Aw shit they have a proper video response.
TL;DW It looks like they're slowing production massively until they sort their internal processes out.
If it happens, it won't last. A PR stunt until they feel things have blown over and they'll ramp right back up. People will notice and they'll have a canned response ready which will include various employees saying how they actually prefer the fast pace.
It'll read very similar to all those HR posts on LinkedIn where employees everywhere seem to love going into the office and hate working from home...
Save this post, because it'll be less than a year I predict this will play out.
A PR stunt until they feel things have blown over and they’ll ramp right back up.
It's less of a stunt and more of human nature. They messed up, they realize it, they put controls in place to prevent similar errors, they get into a groove, they loosen the rules to streamline the process, they mess up, they realize it, ....
This is how every single entity in every single production industry works. Financial markets? Obviously. Food Safety? Of course. Buildings and bridges? Uh, yeah. Security? In the news all the time. Submersible adventures to the Titanic? LOL. It is an exceptionally rare condition where an error and a reaction leads to a permanent chance in procedure (though they do exist).
Managed to do a screwdriver plug, Floatplane plug and mention dBrand.
My god...
EDIT: and lttstore.com smh
I started boycotting LTT when he had his shit take about blocking ads being essentially stealing.
Well I sure don't steal Linus anymore that's for sure.
And I would be stealing Linus for sure considering the absolutely crazy amount of ads there is on this channel.
Ever watched a WAN Show without any AdBlock or sponsor block ? That's like 40% of the duration of the video if I include the LTT shop.
It's by far the channel on YT that I watched that pushes the most ads/sponsors. And I'm not even accounting for the YT ads themselves.
Fuck LTT seriously, he can push as much ads as possible AND on top of that you have to watch all of them religiously.
If that's the price for his content, not worth it for me.
I unsubscribed and started boycotting it when I watched a video one day and it wasn’t clear to me that the whole video was a sponsored ad until the very end when they dropped a line like “Oh and thanks to our sponsor XYZ for giving us all of the hardware we showed you today.”
I was watching multiple reviews on products I was a shopping for and realized they were an unreliable source if they didn’t disclose this was basically a shill video until the last few minutes.
I'm just a passive observer who's watched maybe a few dozen LTT videos ever, but this here was also my take away and always has been with this organization. I don't know how big this company is but they're clearly at a level where they, as a company, are mostly in it for the money. For me as an outsider, LTT is becoming more well known for the problems it has more so than the service it provides.
This blatant plug to ask people for money in what should be a somber apology video is arrogant and obscene. They're acting as if they're all-powerful and infallible in a video explaining their failures.
It strikes me that they're putting themselves in a position to rectify foundational disorganization because they're more concerned about revenue than they are fulfilling their promise to to their audience - robust testing and reviews / critique that can consumers can trust without hesitance.
Asking people to buy things should not at all cross your mind in the production of this video.
With that said, if they are the mega-org that I presume they are, it's their prerogative to be concerned about revenue more than anything else. As a consumer, I don't find revenue-centric organizations among the top of entities I would deem trust-worthy.
Is everyone other than Linus wife reading off a teleprompter?! Come on!
I don't see anything wrong with that, and chances are they all are. It takes a good speaker to do it without making it feel artificial, but if you're a big enough company you have marketing, legal and corporate vet all external announcements first, even for videos such as this. That's just an entirely normal part of the process.
Better use a teleprompter than have them spend an additional $500 to reshoot it.
Well, I hope they really mean it and don't just go back to their old ways later
I think this article misrepresents things. They left out the worst stuff.
Journalism is dead and I hate seeing people post this shit instead of the actual source. There's no other way to get information
Honestly, after the allegations on Xitter, I think it's time for Linus to not just post apology videos but actually take a leave of absence. He's the problem and he needs to admit that to himself. Bring in experts on fixing a broken company culture, reorg the company, let those experts fire some problem people, go take some classes on leadership full-time, and come back in a few months and just be a talking head at his company. No leadership at all.
Either way I'm done with them now. Maybe not forever, but I'm not giving them any benefit of the doubt for a very long time.
In my opinion he should step down as CEO of Linux, and hand the job over to someone more qualified, like Ethan Zusks.
Who fucking cares? Stop consuming their content and they are gone
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