Sounds convincing, however businesses don't deserve the benefit of the doubt. For me to trust and support this content again, the investigation of the allegations needs to produce conclusive evidence. The whole quality drama passed to the background after Madison showed up what really went inside LMG
Either LMG admits wrongdoing and dishes out consequences to those involved, or they present verifiable and damning evidence showing no abuse occurred. Unlike bootlickers at reddit and ltt forums, I don't side with businesses against people. If you live in this world and not in your mom's basement you'd understand why.
If LMG comes out with "we found nothing," "no conclusions could be made," or something along those lines without evidence, then fuck them. Not good enough.
I vote with my wallet (and time), and I won't deal with more corpo BS while abusing emplpyees. Before any smartasses come here with the usual "you live in society" crap. Yeah I can't go live in the woods like a hermit to be morally right, but I can sure as hell drop a shit tech yt channel.
EDIT: taking another look, the second half of the video was more defensive nonsense. Basically claiming they aren't a twitter sweatshop, they are the victims, and some heavily edited parking loot footage as "proof"
And the turnover rate is at best a shaky argument, One can argue since it's mostly guys, they're not gonna be at the same situation to be bullied, insulted and sexually harassed until leaving. It doesn't seem the culture will be fixed anytime soon, so I'm just gonna stop wasting more time with it.
The burden of proof works the exact opposite way. You make a claim, then you need to support verifiable and damnable evidence. Not the other way around.
This isn't a court trial tbh, and what has come forth from Madison's side (testimonies, recording, consistency) is more than enough for me to put the ball entirely on LMG's side.
No reason to keep giving businesses the benefit of the doubt when in many cases they have every advantage over the situation.
They did an okay job of addressing the accuracy issue, but failed to even mention the issues of workplace culture and absurd quotas.
It does not matter if workers start and stop their shifts at particular time - as strictly required by law - when the amount of work they are expected to do within that time frame is unrealistic.
Upping the expections for quality, without lowering those for quality, will only make things worse for everyone working there.
Not to mention it didn't even touch on the note serious allegations of sexual harassment.
SA wasn't mentioned because that is a sensitive investigation. It is messy, and sadly boils down to, he said she said, most of the time. I don't expect that to be resolved for a while.
Don't worry, they lowered the quotas (while adding a shitton of process).
Linus just can't seem to get over the fact that employees should have some free time at work, especially in creative or highly technical fields. It's all about time being money.
If someone wants to take longer on a project just because they want to, there should be time for that. Salaried employees shouldn't have to account for their time down to 15 minutes increments outside of contracting work. The fee for that kind of time accountability is about 4x what a salaried employee generally makes.
If you do it right, having processes that are well reasoned and adhered to is a net time saver. I've been on teams with many different levels of processes. I can say from 20+ years of experience that there is nothing worse than a pipeline with too few processes. When every writer has a different way of delivering information to the editors, that's a time waster. When every tester has a different way of putting together a spreadsheet to hand off to the graphics department, that's a time waster.
Also, processes are supposed to serve the needs of the staff. Not the other way around. If a process adds too much effort for little reward, you can always change it or scrap it. Ideally, you'd have someone on staff whose job it is to manage your process flow, facilitate handoffs, and make periodic changes to the processes to close up inefficiencies and pain points for the staff.
but failed to even mention the issues of workplace culture and absurd quotas.
For my own understanding, was there something that was missing in their content reforms/error handling and workplace culture segments? I think they had mentioned a commitment to reducing frequency, which I understand is a solution to those, no?
I was mistaken - they did say they would "reduce output." However, they said nothing about how, how much, or what that would mean.
They also heavily implied that they were not overworking people, despite that clearly and evidently being a real issue.
It's exceptionally difficult to address this sort of deep-seated issue, but they needed to acknowledge specific wrongdoing, and take concrete action to improve, as they did with the accuracy issue.
Agreed - this announcement started well in detailing the positive changes to workflows and quality assurance, but quickly turned south once the finger wagging and defensiveness raised it's ugly head again.
FFS, this is the time to accept responsibility, take the criticisms on the chin, and show how you're going to make things better - not fall back on the "some people are being really mean to us and we're really the victims here" BS.
Am I the naive one in missing where they were finger wagging? I thought it was a good video throughout. It anything, I saw that they committed to even more process transparency of their business operations (which, to be fair, no company does unless they are an open source company).
Only time will tell, but if those changes had already been in the works even before the blowout, then I'm not sure if there actually is any other way of communicating that without simply unproductively crucifying oneself
A lot better of a response, but I think Linus missed the point on toxic workplace/culture comments.
I'm sure they're not able to comment on Madison (for good legal reason and they still need the third party firm to investigate), but Linus' response just felt more "look at all the nice things LMG does" rather than a commitment about the long-term cultural issues. Anonymous employee surveys are really difficult to trust because a) they have a reputation of not being anonymous and b) if the culture has someone already scared to be open, it's doubtful that there will be honest answers. It sounds like LMG did take their one-on-one meetings seriously, but time will only tell.
(Personal ancedote: I have had managers watch me fill out those anonymous surveys to make sure it was "filled out properly.")
Yeah, it's nice LMG gives decent Christmas bonuses and hold have all those off-hours events, but I can't help but feel it's designed more to keep employees trapped in the LMG bubble and when you feel trapped, it's harder to push back and up for yourself.
I don't want Linus/LTT to fail. Mistakes are bound to happen and I enjoy watching a tiny Canadian man put things down really fast. I honestly just don't want to support a complete jerk that purposefully hurts other people and refuses to take accountability. If it comes out that everything with Madison is true and LMG takes no corrective action, I will have no issue hard blocking LMG content.
EDIT: Further thoughts after reading the responses:
It's really none of our business what happened between Madison and LMG. The only thing that matters is hoping Madison has a good support system in place and LMG makes the necessary internal changes in response to the third-party investigation.
I don't think it's wrong that they shared their turnover numbers, but I don't think it's representative of the big picture. LMG's roles feel more specialist in nature. I don't imagine there's a high amount of jobs in some areas that LMG offers, which means people are less likely to leave. It's also possible that some parts of the company are shielded from what happens elsewhere. (It appears both Creator Warehouse and Floatplane weren't as impacted)
It's good to at least some companies take anonymous surveys / one-on-one feedback seriously. Rewatching the video, it appears they are taking one-on-one feedback seriously, which I hope is the case.
Although I don't disagree, publicly announcing turnover stats that are far below average kinda blows a giant hole in the "LMG is a toxic hellhole" narrative. I've been in toxic hellholes, and turnover tells the real story.
This also doesn't negate necessarily Madison's statements and there probably have been real issues, but I think this is the part of the video where he said (paraphrased) "don't panic about a rise in intentional turnover." I lead a team about LMG's size, and people often don't realize that you can say and demonstrate your values consistently at this size, and still have someone fuck it up because some people just come to the org with the wrong learned behavior and it's gargantuan to re-program them to a healthy state, and a smaller few are just unsalvageable assholes. See also, the Stanford Prison experiment. It would extremely not blow my mind to learn that a few people or a particular team in LMG are entirely toxic and it was missed, and also that the experience for the vast majority doesn't match with this and they're trying to run an ethical company. My (optimistic) assumption is that the intentional turnover comment is probably going to focus on those that Madison dealt with.
If I had to guess, I'd say the turnover stats only count full employees, and are therefore a reflection of their "trial period" hiring policy more than anything else. They avoid needing to officially "fire" people they don't like, and anyone who isn't comfortable with the culture can leave without needing to "resign".
On top of that, LTT holds "dream job" status in many people's minds, so a lower-than-average turnover is expected, and it's impossible to distinguish that effect from the working conditions.
I'm not saying it's necessarily a bad place to work, I'm just saying the stats they gave are inconclusive.
Agreed, I thought mentioning those statistics was a tasteful way of addressing that conversation as best as possible in a YouTube video, and those "people will be fired" comments felt like a clear commitment to rooting out and going as far as firing anyone creating that kind of environment.
The amount of "Linus didn't even talk about" in this thread is crazy to me, just feels like bad reading comprehension when he directly addressed most of the conversation (HR, work hours and environment, etc) and even committed to firing people in a video his staff will all be watching.
I guess its not just anonymous surveys though is it, its that, plus a low turnover, plus 1-1 feedback sessions and other things I'm probably forgetting. But don't overlook the conclusion where if you read between the lines, more personnel changes are likely as a result of this.
I think your last point is highly unlikely, there is too much light on this for the issues alleged by Madison to be true, and for LMG to do nothing. But the tricky thing is that the full truth about Madison's issues is unlikely to be made public, and equally the full action taken by LMG will not be made public. HR, and employment issues kinda require privacy - this isn't a government or public department, its a private company with responsibilities to employees past & present mandated by law.
Agreed on your point regarding Madison/LMG - it really isn't our business to begin with and the best to hope for is that everyone involved is able to resolve it privately.
I've always viewed off-hours events as a sort of shitty way to show you're a "fun company" (tm). For workers who are already expected to put in well above 40 hours per week in a stressful environment asking them to cut further into their free time for work events really isn't very helpful. It's just one more obligation to the company that you are now being pressured to fulfill
IMHO, there's anything wrong with the occasional one-off optional event, like a bowling night or picnic. That said, I've always felt like events are more of a risk/liability/personality assessment - if my manager doesn't think I'm a fun activity buddy, does that mean I'm screwed?
My company has those surveys. As far as I know they are anonymous but the problem is any feedback falls on your direct supervisor to fix. The first year they did it a lot of us were honest about it and our boss got absolutely wrecked over it even though he had very little control over the organizational problems we were complaining about so the next one we always just based it off things he had a say in which he's a good boss so the surveys no longer aligned with the company as a whole.
"Mr. Sebastien, in your video from August 26, 2023 marked as exhibit 23B you referred to "the Madison situation". Can you explain what you meant by 'situation'?"
You may not like it but when there's credible accusations of harassment, constructive dismissal, and possibly up to battery you do not make public statements of any kind beyond, "We are investigating and taking the accusations seriously", which in case you missed it the CEO of LMG already did a week ago.
I hate that we're commenting without understanding the nuances you've highlighted above, and building a flawed emotional worldview based on things that are legally inadvisable for LMG to say.
That bit at the start about addressing the people who want to see them fail... ehhh
I mean, people who actively want to see you fail just because shouldn't really be engaged with at all tbfh, and if he's referrring to who I think he's referring to, then bleah
Otherwise at least they're back, let's see how they improve
That's this community though. This place is still just actively hating. If you are unhappy with LMG and aren't willing to see how they improve moving forward, then just... move on to another channel.
I guess unsubing from this community wasn't enough, gotta actually block it.
Apparently the guy from Gamers Network is just a hater, and him bringing up all this stuff that they have to "introspect" over was just him being a dick. I mean, the fans figured he was right enough to throw a shitfit, but he should know better than to criticize Linus. After all, Linux is infallible except when he's not.
And also, A lot of people want to see him fail because he's simply refusing to fix the years of misogynistic and hustle culture to the point of sexual harassment and a lack of journalistic integrity
Listening to it, there is a lot of focus on saying things alluding to "we were already in the process of fixing this" rather than "we fucked up and this will be fixed".
I'm also a little concerned to see that gender affirming healthcare isn't listed on their health plan when they have trans members of staff. I completely understand why Emily doesn't want to be in the public eye but she is by far my favourite host and I'd love to see her back and producing high quality, well thought out videos where she is given the creative time she needs. The people pressuring her (as well as others) to comment on everything were completely out of order though.
I think the culture of misogyny is demonstrated by the number of male hosts compared to women. Part of the reason people wanted Madison on board was because she would have fit the role perfectly and they just dumped her in the corner on socials. YouTube is a new industry and its disappointing that it is still as male dominated as the tech journo industry that came before it.
What I think is needed is for the staff to unionize and for the company to stop micromanaging and pushing performance because the "fun" doesn't feel like real fun, it feels like corporate forced fun. McDonalds does a christmas party for their staff and you don't hear people praise them for their workplace culture.
I am so pissed about what they did to Madison, she was my favorite host hefore she even was an employee. To see that get dumpstered and spat on really hurt their reputation permanently for me
Asking for clarification on paragraph 3. Are you saying that the lack of female hosts is solely indicative of misogyny or are you saying that it’s a sign or some other option. I wouldn’t want people to make the assumption that there will always be an even spread of men and women everyone in every role. (There’s ways to look at these statistics on a per industry basis IIRC)
Overall, I agree with all of your points (I think) but just wanted to make sure we weren’t jumping to any conclusions. The Tech industry in large part has been sexist, misogynistic, etc towards women specifically (trans-women too) - sometimes I wonder how bad it is when compared to other industries, mostly because I know it’s hard to get people into Tech to begin with due to other stereotypes of technical people. Sometimes I think tech bros are just projecting and reflecting all that hate they’ve gotten onto women/new kids on the block.
I hope this new generation continues to foster more and more inclusivity and self reflection. Support your local Girls Who Code!
Linus himself has said on the WAN show that they want to employ more women but they still haven't had any real growth or development in that area since. I mean that even if Linus wants there to be women in the roles there are reasons that there aren't.
First off, it sucks to be the only woman in a room. You don't want to feel tokenized but you often will. After being on the receiving end of sexism, you probably will be the one who has to speak out about it the most. Just like how Maddison was called a tattle tale, I've been called bitchy and a professional victim myself for that very reason and that has included in workplaces that are built to be feminist from the ground up.
To properly fight the patriarchal workplace environment means that men should be identifying each other's behaviour as a problem and nipping it in the bud before women have to put up with it. The fact that the inappropriate joke landed in their apology video shows they don't do the due diligence of making those checks. People often meme on the phrase "check your privilege" but I'd say that is what it actually means in practice; unfortunately people tend not to explain that too well.
The plan is solid, but forgive me if I give it a few years of "wait and see" how well they keep their word and more importantly handle work place allegations and changes before I re-subscribe to the channel. Still a good plan and I hope it's a sincere one.
Tek Syndicate surprisingly came out with one of the best takes I've seen on this situation. This could be a real damaging moment for LTT, but getting an employee union could address the criticism perfectly.
They're good, old techtuber. Used to be a really big company until one of the guys they hired to help expand just fucked up everything. Very well informed but he's still an entertainer
Reading the Reddit thread on this, I find it fascinating that, at the beginning of the incident, Lemmy had more balanced conversations vs the crazies on Reddit calling for LTT disbandment. Now after the latest video, it seems like Reddit seems more reasonable and receptive with Linus' plans vs Lemmy being the LTT doomsayers.
You are a stronger person than I. I still refuse to go back to Reddit after the bs they tried to pull lol. I've been looking at other ltt communities, but this is still the biggest community..
You mean literally only calling out Linus repeatedly dodging the waterblock issue and stating that Unionisation would resolve most of the other employee dissatisfaction issues?
I am still not very impressed with the response from Linus and company. It is quite clear that they decided to slave themselves to the YouTube algorithm without regard for the humans involved. So many of their videos devolve into an unintentional Abbott and Costello comedy routine because they clearly did not decide to spend the time preparing properly or realizing they missed something and starting again. They just plow through without regard for the quality of people involved.
Sometimes this is entertaining, but more often than not, it is just low quality and a waste of their time.
I want entertaining tech content, but not at the expense of the people involved. Honestly, it is fascinating to see the sausage being made. I would love for them to show the difficult process of making a high quality video and getting the process corrected. Then have the final produced video. Full transparency, warts and all.
Alternative take - playing up to the YouTube algorithm is what has allowed LMG to expand to the point where it provides jobs for over 100 (is it near 200 now?) people. Those people work hard, yet the majority seem to stay with the company which suggests any alternative employment isn't attractive enough to motivate them to leave their current work conditions.
Work conditions suck just about everywhere these days. I wouldn't consider what I have seen from employee interviews to be ringing endorsements nor total loathing. It is probably worse than you think and better than I expect. I still think they are chasing the wrong metrics regardless of whether it is a good place to work. The fact that Linus burned himself out gives you more than a hint of what it is like for others working there.
I am glad that they plan to improve and made steps towards it, but i still have a sour taste in my mouth:
I was expecting a formal apology for the monoblock and mouse skates film issue. Both of these were instances where LTT threw another smaller company under the bus. Them not addressing it further gives the assumption that they can, and will keep getting away with stuff like this.
Their new guidelines for correction policy are flawed; even the low-severity ones are thing that really shouldn't be tolerated with no corrective action, and all factual mistakes should be re-shot or voiced over instead of on-screen corrections.
They hardly touched upon the whole Madison situation, except for some boasting about employee benefits.
In the whole situation, I felt like they failed to really admit that they were sorry for what hapened, and were taking the role of the victims.
"We are people too" and a whole segment in this video of emails from fans hoping they will get better soon and "survive this difficult shitstorm". LMG was merely getting away with this stuff for a long time and just now have been called out. They don't deserve any harassment, however, they also don't deserve any "Get better soon" emails from fans.
TL;DR: I will most likely continue to watch Linus tech tips for entertainment purposes, but will no longer trust them on any technical details, and would go to other channels for tutorials on how to build a pc and such.
They hardly touched upon the whole Madison situation, except for some boasting about employee benefits.
My impression was that they were trying to keep that and the testing and workload issues mostly separate. They hired an independent firm to investigate them, and I doubt the results are in yet. So I wouldn't be surprised if there was a separate update later on.
But they did mention their turn over rate might increase in the short term. I took that as meaning they would fire the people guilty in the allegations, but we don't know for sure yet.
"As happy as I am that Terren is here, he can't make these changes alone [... many paragraphs later ...] That's also why we brought in an experienced manager, Terren who is offsite this week or I would have brought him in to chat with you guys as well"
So "all hands" in "crisis time"... And the CEO isn't there and hasn't been for the whole week? This is literally where a good CEO should be in house looking at EVERYTHING. Not away on a golf trip or whatever the fuck he's doing.
I think I'm on the same TL;DR... I might find a video interesting enough to watch for entertainment here and there... But at this point I will no longer treat anything I hear from them as actually data. And if the Madison thing turns out to be true, will simply hard block their channel.
I don't think anyone's dumb enough to go on a golf trip during a crisis. Linus wouldn't have defended that and would have fired anyone who would've gone on a golf trip while the rest of the company works their asses off to get LMG back in shape.
I would prefer to assume good faith. Maybe a family member is in critical care? Maybe collaboration with investigators? Maybe legal consultation? All of those are pretty good reasons not to be in the video.
I mean if you are talking about the last timestamp I think its implying if the findings of the investigation find out some pretty heavy misdeed by some staff members probably in relation to Madison comments and possibly or other things they found while going through fact finding may mean some people (maybe even very notable personalities) may get fired.
He really needs to take a step back and let Teran do his what they hired him to do. He has stated multiple times that he is no a CEO. he has no actual training or education and it has been showing for years now. Every talking head episode he pushes out like this just seems to dig his legacy further into this hole.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that this whole "plan" was concocted and deployed by the entire leadership team, with Reran giving the final approval. Linus is still the face of the company, so it's no surprise he is the one telling us about this plan.
Then they need to preface every video with that. "We ran all these benchmarks and testing using hundred-thousand-dollar equipment and are presenting this as a factual review, but please keep in mind this is all entertainment and not educational and the numbers are made up so just disregard this whole video."
I would contend that most of the YouTube tech channels, even the ones with great reputations for quality such as Hardware Unboxed and Gamers Nexus are barely educational as well.
While they can point to fewer mistakes made as a result of their methodologies, I don't believe there is any real scientific value in the conclusions they reach from testing that is far too limited with far too small a sample size. They can paint broad recommendations - product A should be better than product B because our testing showed 20% better numbers.
But when the metric variances between products are small, none of the testing methodologies can really tell you which of the products will work better in your system. They haven't tested enough of them, and in enough situations to have a clue. And I think any of them claiming that there is inherent value to their methods are really just defending their product which is the video they're getting eyeballs in front of so they can make money from advertising.
Check out Gamers Nexus. In their last ITX case review, you can see just the level of immense detail, specifications and testing for a simple computer case.
They're staying smaller. I don't know if they could maintain that quality while growing wildly. But they are doing a really good job. I think the issues in ltt came from the bigger size and huge growth.
Think of LTT as top gear for computers. If you want to learn stuff I don't know look at tutorials?
Part of their problem is that they are a bit ambiguous in what they're actually aiming at. If they just went full throttle let's water cool a computer with mountain dew, or in the other end of the scale actually bring in their labs to the forefront of the content that would be fine, but at the moment this kind of weird mix in the middle and it's hard to pin them down on anything, it changes from video to video and without any real indicator to tell you what type of video this is going to be.
Maybe the labs stuff should be split off onto its own channel. That way, people that want that kind of content, and only that kind of content, can go subscribe there. Without having to deal with all the, let's see if I can heat my pool with my giant rich guy server rack stuff.
This is satisfying change. If they go with it and no new shit floats up then I'm willing to re-subscribe. Otherwise there would be no point putting pressure if we, as the community, are not willing to reward them listening to us.
Don't give a flying fuck about the drama. Just want to see more content.
I was thrilled to see there was a a new TechLinked with Riley. I love how he even alluded to the controversy without actually talking about it by mentioning the nonsense on r/LTT. I wonder if it is any more or less annoying than the endless complaining and badmouthing on Lemmy.
He's a slimly mother fucker. Good well worded reaction to be fair. If it did feel like ChatGPT did the ground work for him. Looks like he's spent the past 12 hours crying, prob due to the YouTube earnings taking a nosedive. Like most managers who can't manage, but have read the book of what to say, didn't feel at all sincere...
We hear you.. loud and clear but....
We have doubled our virtually non existent budget ...
We want to provide... But....
Someone else is welcome to the top spot. Oh how they fall...
Wow. Looks like my comments last week about waiting for both sides to speak (which were heavily downvoted) was the correct move.
You guys are embarrassing. You're no better than toxic ass Reddit. Even the comments posted here now are ridiculous, like those refusing to watch this video lmao.
I watch most of LTT videos for years, but I gotta admit I have no idea what is going on with this drama, they never actually say specifically what they are accused of - I'm starting to think it's just drama for the sake of drama, and I hate that shit
I don't even know who the victim is, I'm commenting about how I only watch LTT videos on YouTube , and since that is my source of info - they never actually say what they did wrong, makes me feel like the 2 videos they have put out aren't very genuine.
super short version:
1: they have been pointed out as being very sloppy with presenting data, this could be construed as the type of drama you are talking about if you squint hard enough.
2: they have been accused of being a place with sexual (and other) harassment among the workers, and choosing not to help the vicitm(s). This is not good in any light.
Thank you for the info, I was after a tldr version since I don't spend all my time on LTT specific communities (I found this post via all on lemmyworld)
Because all the rest of the comments are being super helpful, here’s the rundown for those not terminally online.
Another YouTube channel, Gamer’s Nexus, made this video talking about the inaccuracies in LTT’s lab data which also mentions a huuuuuge faux pas by LTT auctioning off a prototype model of a product from a company that only has that prototype. LTT also dunked hard on that prototype due to improper testing parameters that the company said that the product is not rated for. Some serious workspace allegations also came up around this time from a former LTT employee, but there’s no hard evidence.
If it were not serious they wouldn't have to address it. But they do.
They don't mention it by name to protect their image. A shit practice because it gives the impression of dishonesty and evasion. They don't name the things so as not to acknowledge and announce them. Viewers may not know the full scope of accusations or may feel worse about LTT when they name the issues. So they don't.
As someone in my 30s it sounds like every job I've had. Even moreso when it comes down to being a small business type job.
Not saying it's fine... I just wonder if there are other ways to go about changing things. It's obviously not just ltt that this goes on. It's obvious that it's been our culture and it's only beginning to change.
Personally I feel like a lot of people in society don't stand up for themselves and wait too long before taking a stand. That's probably where victim blaming stems from. And when I say speak up or stand up, I don't mean go tattling BEFORE you look the person fucking with you in the eyes and tell them not to ever treat you like that again. You gotta let people understand what's wrong, especially coming from a culture where all this is basically still considered normal. Otherwise the situation gets clouded by useless drama and emotional confusion that distract from change actually happening.
I feel like modern "oUtRaGe" culture, for lack of a better term, is becoming a set back in terms of moving forward with change. People act like they want criminals reformed instead of prisoned, but then gladly skip reform or teaching the lesson with a level head in these "outrage" situations. To me this shit is like watching politicians or sports teams... It's just entertainment for people... As long as they're on the winning side they really don't care about the change or the lesson.
Teach the lesson, when the lessons learned the class is over.