She picked the right moment to come out with this. I mean, keeping this in for 2 whole years while being under the impression that you're under some NDA, you can only imagine how stressful she must've felt.
I feel really sorry for her and I wish her the best. She's a really cool person.
It's sad people have to wait for these opportunities to come, if at all. Otherwise people would dismiss them as a liar or disgruntled employee. There are too many sycophants even now that will back Linus no matter what.
I was a floatplane subscriber for quite a while. All of this stuff over the past week has made me rethink it all and I just can’t support it. Unsubscribed.
It's best not to assume the worst of people right away, especially those that you do not know personally. This happens too often on the internet and by extension, in real life. It can be hard to do that, I know, but the more people that do it, the better it is for everyone.
Madison has been talking about this for awhile now. Dig up old tweets and posts and she's definitely mentioned sexual harassment since she left LTT. No one paid attention until now.
This is worse than the Gamer's Nexus video. The biggest red flag initially wasn't even the bad testing data, it was how overworked the staff were. Clearly employee wellness is not a priority.
The Gamer’s Nexus video was necessary for others to speak out. Steve was clear that speaking up was a move that could backfire due to the power imbalance involved. Had he not spoken up there would be no opportunity for Madison to weigh in her experiences without being attacked.
After I came forward about being assaulted, Someone accused Linus of inappropriate conduct on twitter.
He came over to my corner and started BERATING HER. Calling her insane, mentally ill, an attention seeker, and just digging into this poor woman who had felt wronged by him.
Linus sounds pretty consciously malicious to me...
“Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority; still more when you superadd the tendency of the certainty of corruption by authority.”
This is not my thesis but someone else’s but as a counterpoint to this platitude, look at the difference between Lincoln versus Nixon. Both were leaders at pivotal times but they took very different ethical directions. Sometimes character and background DOES matter and we SHOULD expect more of our leaders. Just assuming they will all be corrupt makes up disengage from the process.
None of this is surprising to me at all. I’ve been seeing hints of a toxic ‘hustle’ mindset in their videos for quite some time and have commented as much on the videos. I’ve worked in environments just like this and once you’ve lived it it’s easy af to spot.
Linus probably says ‘I don’t ask anything of anyone that I don’t expect of myself’ and then goes on to expect someone making 50k to put in as much time and effort as he did when first starting LTT/LMG.
The key issue in all of this that they didn't address is that they're pushing too fast. There have been many red flags about Linus pushing people too hard to get stuff done too fast.
It doesn't matter what kind of "new processes" you put in place if people just don't have time. And you can't expect every employee to work as though they have 20% equity in the company. If you put more than 30 hours of work per week onto a full time, salaried employee, you're not going to get their best work, especially in creative or expertise-required jobs.
To do their best work, people need time to breathe. They need time to be able to talk to their coworkers about a problem without worry about pulling them away from their own work for 15 minutes. They need time to grab a drink or a sandwich while they step back from a problem and consider it from a distance. They need time to decide their previous work wasn't good enough and to go back and redo it. They shouldn't have to ask. Having to ask is a problem. Getting "no" back as an answer is an even bigger problem.
If you try to account for every 15 minutes, you're going to get shit quality product pushed out the door.
Madison brought this up. Employees have brought this up in videos. And Linus has raised red flags more than once. The biggest was with his equating doing things right to hours worked and directly to cash. That speaks to exactly this. People don't have time to do things right, and they don't have time to fix things.
The only way to fix this is to either hire more people (which you clearly can't afford), or allow your current people to put out less product.
If you put more than 30 hours of work per week onto a full time, salaried employee, you’re not going to get their best work, especially in creative or expertise-required jobs.
Facts. If you claim you can work more than ~30 maybe 40 hours (that's really pushing it) a week in this type of work without output/quality falling off a cliff, you have lots of room for process automation from my experience. I don't think I do more than ~15-20 hours of actual active programming per week. If I have hard deadlines, pushing that out to 60-80 hours does increase output but nowhere close to linear output.
And as other people said, she was expected to output that much social media posts, but now they post the bare minimum. Maybe she was being asked too much after all.
U do that when u think its a stupit position that doesnt really mather when u got a company of 10 to 20 people. When u hire lets say 90 poeple it starts to breakdown.
I figured it was stressful there, and I always kind of dismissed the dickheads in the community as “the internet being the internet” but it seems it’s WAY worse.
This is not your conventional toxic workplace. This is ADVANCED toxicity. She resorted to self harm for a day off. That's a type of struggle that can make a company go terminal if the rank and file band together.
This supports the notion that the issues with quality are due to overextended teams. It sounds like yet another workplace where upstairs decisions are made without consulting the people who will actually do the work, and so the rank and file have to constantly scramble to make up for that. I feel like LTT leadership decided a velocity of content to support certain goals rather than what their resources can actually do.
... And it also seems like they have not outgrown the "early joiners can do whatever they want to whomever they want" problem that plagues companies like this.
I mean we already knew their staff was overextended, and that upper management has been pushing for velocity at the expense of quality. This has been self evident by the myriad of issues pointed out in Steve's video.
What wasn't already apparent was how horrendously abusive of a workplace LMG appears to actually be. This is quite literally shocking and I honestly think most of the commenters are underreacting, lol.
This poor girl was sexually assaulted by coworkers/management on multiple occasions. Verbally abused regularly. And she had to self harm to a degree that she needed to go to the ER just to TAKE A DAY OFF FROM WORK.
I used to work in tech myself, and I've heard some horror stories, especially from women in tech. But this is among the worst. If all this is true, LMG is a horrific, toxic, abusive organization and I hope they get sued into the ground.
It's been a while since I regularly watched LMG content, so I wasn't really aware of how many videos they were churning out. Looking at it now, I would assume their staff was much larger than it is.
Ironically, the harassment/assault/retaliation stuff is the one area they'd benefit from being a bit more corporate. Obviously they aren't capable of ending it for the purposes of basic human decency. Maybe a liability approach would get through...
Similar to the Amazon "disagree and commit" policy which, if you didn't know, means you can/should disagree if you feel that way and then you should fall in line and shut up.
If the allegations about the sexual topics are true (like managing the OnlyFans account and having to see other people's junk, being told to twerk for a coworker and getting asked about "how she liked to fuck") LTT is in some serious trouble.
No sponsor in their right mind wants to be associated with a bunch of grown men sexually assaulting their female coworkers. If this isn't cleared up totally and publically, LTT will lose a lot of sponsors and this can seriously hurt them.
When the employee handbook leaked a few months ago and this was mostly ignored by Linus except him making a rant about the company not needing unions because they're so great, that was already very suspicious to me. It seemed like just another hustle culture company trying to sweep things under the rug. Well, looks like it was not just a feeling...
Linus has admitted to bullying others when he was younger, guess that side of him never went away. Just good at hiding it or editing out of public view. I'm looking back now wondering if he even properly compensated his employees for doing what should have been CONTRACT work on his house or just what they would have made from the videos so he could profit off free labor.
Definitely unsubscribing from all their channels. All of that shit is absolutely disgusting.
I had wondered what happened to her and why she seemed to rarely be in any content despite having a good camera presence. It sucks that she had to put up with all that. Linus should have put in his big boy pants and fired the shit heads that helped create such a toxic work environment. He clearly does not know how to manage a company.
Linus is the problem. It’s a top down problem, and he’s the one at the top. Everything stems from time and lack of it to resolve issues correctly. When you don’t have time to deal with things and more things get requested of you, it’s human nature to try to downplay or discredit their importance.
You cannot excuse this with time. Taking this to a marginal extreme to demonstrate the point - you don't dismiss a report that one of your employees shot another because you don't have the time for it.
You’re right, I meant more that over worked people don’t clearly think things through like they should, but this really is of that level where it’s a bad excuse regardless.
Reading the full thread was stressful enough, I don't even want to image what it was like to live it.
Now I understand why the company is so against unionizing, all this stuff would pretty quickly explode in their face. It's straight up abuse that should be met by the full force of the legal system.
What the fuck is wrong with people that makes them think that if you have the smallest modicum of power over someone else it's your god given right to be an asshole, a sexual predator or just generally toxic.
His Union comments are just tone deaf. He’s not wrong that it would be a failure on the company if people felt they needed to unionize. It doesn’t need to be said. Clearly he didn’t think he treated his employees badly, but here we are.
No; what, he’s exactly wrong in saying that! Regardless on your thoughts on unions, that’s never something that a CEO/Founder should say about their company, first because it’s just incredibly stupid like you noted, but also because it’s the biggest red flag that you DO need to unionize ASAP!
At the end of the day, Linus was trying to sell ‘we don’t need a union because we’re the cool workplace’, but it’s always been because unions, by definition, dilute the power of people in his position, which I’m sure he feels very threatened by, especially the longer he built this Jenga tower.
And if you think that companies that are unionized are a sign of failure… well, I don’t know how to address that without pulling out my own hair.
I have not agree in so far that workers who decide to unionize usually do it because their company has wronged them. I don’t recall hearing of a workplace trying to unionize that are completely happy.
Everyone saying this isn't malice, it fucking is. All of this is done out of malice. He is angry his employees don't treat this like their day 1 dream and give their entire 45k/yr soul to the brand. He is upset that people would even dare question their products. He is furious that employees would have the gall to expect time off.
It is malice, it always has been. Capitalist hold everyone in contempt, especially employees. It is the easiest thing in the fucken world to take a little less profit from your pocket and add it to the people who actually make your company run. None of these fucks do it because they hate their own employees. They don't want humans working for them, they want cheap drones that follow their every word intention. The people at the top of any company fucking hate they have to pay you at all. Accept that. That is reality.
So much of what she says is not just horrifying (seriously, feeling the need to hospitalize yourself for a day off), but also straight up illegal.
Retribution, hostile work environment, straight up harassment, not to mention evidence of "constructive dismissal". (I'm using US terms but I know these have equivalent laws in Canada)
I've had some pretty bad jobs that have destroyed my mental health, but none of them come close to what Madison is describing here and I am so happy that this is coming out. This is the sort of thing people need to know about LTT and LMG.
Honestly, that's a much larger issue to me than the beef with GN. Forcing the image of a super cool liberal easy company while being as shitty as every other bigger greedy firm. So sad.
I honestly did not even know that she had left, so all of this is news to me. I assumed that she went into a role that suited what she wanted to do (like production or editing or something with no significant on camera time), and was still there. I usually avoid following anything so closely that I'm aware of whatever drama they get into. Which isn't to imply that Madison's experience is mere drama, because it's not. This is an egregious HR violation on all fronts, and bluntly, if Madison still has any evidence of any of this, a lawyer would do well to pick up her case at no cost to Madison; as far as I'm concerned, with any level of evidence, especially right now with the PR nightmare they're currently weathering, they'll want to settle quickly (if they have any sense left in their heads whatsoever).... And Madison can walk away with a very reasonable pay off for all this mental anguish.
Of course, money doesn't un-do the fact that it happened.
On the surface, to me, this looks like LMG hired Madison to appease the masses, partly evidenced by the fact that he announced that he had done so before she was even made aware that they were interested in bringing her on board, which seems to be a trend with Linus now - saying things have happened when he simply rubber stamps the approval to go ahead and start the process.... Then "allowed" her to appear on camera enough to show that yes, she does work here... Then as the hype from fans died down and stopped being a benefit to the company, slowly berated her into leaving quietly so schmucks like me (anyone that's not so dedicated that they read the LTT forums daily), are unaware, and they don't lose viewers.
The workload described, at first didn't sound too bad, busy, sure, but not bad. Some Twitter posts, FB posts, a few tiktoks daily... Yeah ok. That's a fairly reasonable bar to set, a little high IMO, but ok.... Then she went on. And on.... And on.... What the fuck? I get the idea that it's "only social media" so some think it's "not really like working" (which I don't agree with, I just understand why people think that), since managing your own social media is fairly trivial, but when managing it for someone else, you have to constantly check yourself and consider "is this me saying it? Or is this the right tone and perspective for what the company would say?" Because if you say the wrong thing, you're reprimanded, or fired. That kind of mental gymnastics is rough; and having to do that for a dozen posts a day is a lot of work to accomplish alone, and you're probably going to make some mistakes unless you can bounce the posts off of someone like a long term employee or manager to make sure that the message isn't straying from the brand you represent.
I've personally been in plenty of scenarios where I've been over worked. It happens. When being overworked is basically your job duties, that's unreasonable in every way.
On top of that the dismissive and demeaning treatment isn't going to help. I'm not surprised that Madison noped the fuck out, and it's sad that happened, and more sad that she felt that she shouldn't even say anything. It's unsurprising that she left and that she had such a major impact to her mental health by being there... Honestly, it's almost surprising that she stayed as long as she did.... And this isn't even addressing the sexual misconduct. I know for me, when I think "sexual assault" I'm thinking the worst case scenario, and bluntly, some of the comments that she relays (like "you've never gotten drunk with us") makes me think that could have happened... But it's not exclusive to that. This is sexual assault. She was sexually harassed and sexually assaulted by staff and bluntly, I hope she names and shames those who were involved. This is unacceptable in any and every way in the workplace and everywhere else. Madison's gender, sexual orientation, preferences, history, everything, is entirely personal, and discussions of such things in a workplace is completely unacceptable. If she wanted to offer up such information of her own volition, sure, but berating her about it, and harassing or demeaning her about it is completely unwelcome both socially, and legally.
IMO, Madison has a legal case if she ever chooses to pursue it.... I think she should but I understand why she hasn't, and isn't.
As for LTT and LMG, I'm extremely disappointed that Madison was set up to fail like this. I get that it's a bit of a boys locker room, where most of the staff are "one of the guys" regardless of who they are or what gender they are, and ribbing is part of that. Clearly this was above and beyond it and from what people said to Madison after she left, her treatment was worse than most.... Well beyond a good ribbing, and others could tell. Anyone who participates in ribbing among friends can recognise when they've gone too far. IMO, it was clear that they had, and they just kept doing it. No part of that is ok. The staff then took it further and further into sexual harassment and assault, and the management team was complacent. This is wholly unacceptable on LMG's side. Their behaviour is reprehensible.
I hope Madison is doing better. I'll probably track down her twitch and throw her a sub, because she deserves it, and never deserved to be treated the way she was. I don't know what she's doing now, but I wish her all the success in the world.
Alright, time to unsubscribe from their channels. Already started to dislike Linus when he went all Anti-Union and stuff, but this is truly disgusting.
I had heard Linus' anti-union remarks on WAN Show and was slightly weirded out, because I don't believe for a second that a company owner AND manager of a company much smaller than theirs has enough time and resources to really be in touch with what their workers need, even if they have the best intentions.
There once was a WAN Show segment about quiet quitting and his fear that people might do that and it came across as if he was more scared that his employees might do it and thereby "hurt the company" than him being interested in why people feel compelled to only work the minimum amount required. As if he was expecting people to always give him 110%.
Even 90% is enough, that's just reality. If you have people working for you full time, you can't just pay them for their most productive and focused time. There's also socializing with coworkers, taking short breaks and being creative without direct output. It's all part of being a team. A good and healthy team that feels appreciated can take up extra work and make short extra bursts as they become necessary, but that can never be the expected normal.
There was also some WAN Show segment about compensation, free time and the likes that was weird. Maybe it was part of one of the upper two, I don't quite remember. It's a bit fuzzy but I remember that I was a little surprised that they operated on the same scheme of low amount of days off + limited sick days system that many US/North-American companies seem to run on. I get that it's normal in that part of the world, but I still had this idea in my head that they were somehow different. It all felt so quirky, close-knit and best-buddy-like in the videos. That made me think that they were somehow more progressive and worker focused than it turns out after all.
Hearing these allegations is like finding that missing puzzle piece and suddenly it fits into a much bigger picture. I had a lot of respect for Linus and his company and really believed that they were "better". I really like their content, it is super entertaining and of very consistent quality. They are experts at making things accessible and interesting for a broader audience. But they are also running in a giant hamster wheel that is the youtube algorithm and several daily uploads.
Very sad to see how all this could happen. Even worse is how all of this is being handled. They need a proper restructuring because these problems seem to be structural and deep-rooted. I wish Madison all the best!
I feel so much better now, using uBlock and SponsorBlock watching their videos. I knew something was off when Linus started with the Anti-Union talks. Fuck this little bastard.
This person waited until a moment where they felt that people would believe their story.
I don't blame them for it at all, even if I think they should have retained legal counsel over a year ago. Linus would have come to the immediate defensive, calling it a one-off and I could see many of the die-hard fans siding with Linus.
This story is far from unique. Women deal with this shit constantly in the workplace. The vast majority never report because the police and courts don’t take them seriously either. It’s like collectively they just deal with it, and that’s absolutely heartbreaking.
I wouldn't say that she waited, an endless amount of woman and people in general will experience similar things and the public will never know about it.
There is a good chance she took the only opportunity to tell the public what happened to her.
Making this comment because I think it's important to be careful with language when we talk about stuff like this.
Holy shit. I stopped watching about when she quit (not for a reason, the content was just stale) but between this and the recent issues raised by GN o don't think watching LTT is relevant nor even ethical at this point.
Setting aside the factual accuracy of LTT content (which is a separate discussion entirely), the main thing that they did well and that I generally enjoyed was their brand of jank content - like building impractical virtualized gaming setups, stupid water cooling projects, stuff like that.
If even a handful of these accusations hold water then I would no longer be able to enjoy that content knowing what took place behind the scenes in the process of creating it.
If all of them turn out to be true...I am neither Canadian nor a lawyer but it sounds like charges could be brought. In that case I don't see any way that trust in LTT/LMG could be rebuilt outside of some major team members stepping down.
It's Test Kitchen stuff all over again. Corporate capitalist culture repetitively turns lovely and bright stuff about something innocuous and innocent like food or computers into exploitation, greed, harassment, and misery.
Jesus fucking Christ.
Messing up a review, selling a prototype then repaying the company is just unprofessional, this is a whole other fucking level !
It's going to be hard to keep watching their videos after that, especially considering the two of them building a PC was my favourite one.
TBH, I'm not surprised. Linus stance on unions is really weird... My interest in LTTs videos has anyway declined in the last time, maybe I'll take a break and hope they really change some things.
Been a union member at my workplace for 20years, they only give a shit about pay increases for the workers and Linus pays his workers above minimum wage which is what the union would ask for.
In this economic climate no one will strike for just one person when it's those members that are part of the problem.
Unions aren't what they used to be and shouldn't be treated as such.
Your union sucks then. Unions have done all sorts of things besides get more pay. They fight for benefits like vacation and sick time, make sure you can't be fired without cause, ensure good work/life balance, make your job physically safe, and help bad management be held accountable.
Striking isn't the only tool in a union's répertoire. They'll also do things like help pay for lawyers to fund legal action (hard to do as an individual) and negotiate on your behalf. Most people don't want to be negotiators (especially the most vulnerable)
The union does that undesirable work for you and can often hire experts to do it.
Work to rule is an alternative to striking that is similar but keeps you working. That's doing exactly what your contract says and nothing more (eg, bus drivers have done it by not collecting fares, but still driving their routes; teachers have done it by only teachong their classes without doing any extra coaching or supervision on the side). And since your comment suggests that people won't strike because they can't go without pay, they can also pay you for the duration of a strike.
I know your paid for a strike but not at full pay and people are stupid and live paycheck to paycheck.
In our industry (mining) the government is alot more strict then the union ever is about safety or the government will remove the mining lease and shit the place down (been done to other pits in the area).
We work a rotating roster that the company sent to the union during EA talks and they said yeah that's fine without consulting the workforce, and it's been that way since and trying to get the older guys to change to a better roster is a nightmare.
Sick leave and vacation time is government mandated.
You might live in a destopian country with a shitty government but our unions ride the arse of the governments country wide employment mandates and then say they do alot.
It also depends on the country they're in, union culture is still stronger in Canada vs the USA... Heck, labor laws exist everywhere in Canada, just that is a step ahead of the US...
I never stated I wasonly ever in one union I only stated I have been a union member for near 20years. There has been 3 different unions at my workplace and this 3rd union isn't any better then the other 2.
Yes unions have gotten workplaces alot better over the last 100 years, but in the last 15years governments have stripped union powers effectiveness. In Australia most of the benifits unions have gotten have been put into law making 1/2 - 3/4 of what they do not anything different to legal requirements making them only good for pay increases and then calling them "benefits for the employees" and in our case in our last EA agreement it was extremely sub par us members forced the union to go back 3 times for a 2% pay increase per year over 5 years.
If she name drops, shit is really going to fly. But she should only do that if she has proof of who said it. I hope she does. Because if all that's true (and lets be honest, Linus has regularly been fine with showing how toxic of a boss he is on camera, so it's very likely all true) LMG should burn to the ground.
All the previous proof put a dent in their brand but these allegations are actually brand destroying. Linus is evidently an asshole to his workers in his videos so I don't have a hard time believing her allegations. What a fucking dumpster fire.
Oof. I wasn’t too bothered about tech bros shanking each other in name of ethics in tech YouTubing. But this is absolutely unacceptable. I believe Madison. If there is no confirmation from Linus that whoever sexually assaulted and otherwise degraded her has been fired so fast their fucking eyes are spinning then I’m unsubscribing. I will not be watching videos every week where I’m trying to figure out who the creep is.
Wow. What a motherfucking piece of shit company. And Linus is also personally a piece of shit too (see screenshots below). Hope this means the end for LTT on YouTube. Note that the full thread is on Twitter here where she has responded to a few tweets that add further details.
This is pretty distressing to read. I am wondering if the upper management referred to is Linus, or someone else. Doesn't really matter much, the buck ultimately stops with him.
It doesn't sound like the kind of culture that Luke would tolerate, and I can't imagine Luke standing by Linus for that either.
It is worth pointing out that there is nothing Linus can do to respond either, if he was responsible he is hardly gonna own it, and if it was another upper management then he probably can't publically name them either. And there is no way any of us can know what is really happening. Madison is basically the only one who can pass judgement. I am very curious as to how Emily has been treated, especially after coming out, but she has a right to privacy and doesn't have to answer to any of us.
I guess the only real answer is for Tarren CEO to rapidly implement a proper HR department and provide a proper recourse. And if Linus is the direct cause of these issues, then really there is nothing that can be done.
I also can't help but wonder about Taran (the macro king). He left LMG like a year ago and he obviously doesn't have to share details, but it wouldn't surprise me if the work Rythm they put on him was too much, despite him being one of the best premiere editors in the world.
Yeah. That is also an interesting one. For what it's worth, he did seem genuinely thankful towards Linus for taking care of him earlier on in his career, and if he knew something was up I would hope he would have just left instead of being part of the farewell video.
But he probably was getting fairly burnt out. But as always, we cannot know what anyone's motivations for anything are, so it's best we don't second guess people's public statements.
Sure, but they were still in close, and I assume that if this is about Linus, then he has always been that way, so Luke would know about that side of him.
I dunno, I just don't know. Maybe I am being hopelessly naive. The world is a shittier place today.
Just speculating but it sounds a bit like they've drifted apart. According to Luke on the most recent WAN show, he and Linus haven't gamed in about half a year and apart from the WAN show they don't interact a lot. This could be the reason for they're lack of interaction?
Yeah, but I would hope that if Linus was directly responsible for Madison's treatment that Luke would do more than just drift apart. He seems more principled than that. But I don't know them at all, so it is entirely speculation.
I think we should be very careful not to point fingers without knowing the full story. These are very damaging accusations if aimed at the wrong person.
No good reason, he just seems fairly level headed. I could be way wrong though. He has publically call Linus out on his bullshit before.
This could all just be copium speaking, I want it to be a solvable problem, but if it's Linus, I don't think that's really possible. People can change (See: Linus Torvald), but I just dunno if it's possible. And I don't know if Linus Torvald actually changed that much either.
Ok I will wait couple of days to see how it continues, but I will most likely unsubscibe from all their channels and stop watching them completely.
Which will not be hard. For real reviews I watch Hardware Unboxed and Gamer Nexus. LTT was on my watch list for some funy/interesting video here and there. And even those I watched less and less.
I just saw this morning that LTT on YouTube are doing a live stream to "address the situation". They have their upper management trying to clean up the mess as best they can. It stinks of soulless corporate BS.
Honestly they'd benefit from a bit of Soulless Corporate BS at this point. Soulless Corporate BS at least ensures that sexual abuse allegations are taken seriously and there isn't a culture of inappropriate behavior nor language at play
I'm not shocked that they're plagued by cultural issues that have reached their breaking point now. I remember watching some of the first Channel Super Fun videos and thinking "what if someone doesn't want to participate in this? It doesn't look like anyone has a choice" but assumed that it had to be fine
Iono about that one, chief. Soulless Corporate BS is nowhere near a guarantee of ethics. The appearance of structure and organization has only a small correlation to actual organization and structure. I've seen many versions of this. The skeletons in the closet are all the same no matter how brazen or hush-hush you are about them, the real question is are they there, how many, and why. Honestly, Soulless Corporate BS is smoke and mirrors, and a red flag to start off with in itself.
This is the mindset of the entrepreneur that worked this way for years and made it. The problem is that Linus got rich from this, but expect employees to have the same mindset. This is dogshit
Trial periods for new employees aren't anything unusual, even in unionized jobs (my previous job the trial period was 1200h, current job it's a year, that's how long it took before the union would really start fighting for you if something happened).
She really should have went to a lawyer. Besides the fact that she was sexually harassed, lied to, and other large issues, an employer cannot just willy nilly change your contract after you already agreed to one. Them changing the contract after moving to that country, losing her visa, and virtually being stranded there is exactly the same strategy that traffickers employ to exploit immigrants into virtual slavery.
A lot of lawyers would at least hear her out free of charge, and a likely equal amount would see what a slam dunk case it would be in her favor, if everything she alleges in her post is true. The verbal stuff would definitely be trickier to prove without other witnesses coming forward, but I find it highly unlikely that all the mistreatment she suffered was done strictly verbally and there would likely be a paper trail for evidence. In which case, a lawyer would happily take payment after the courts awarded her reparations.
Look, I know this isn't easy and I completely understand why she was terrified of coming forward. I don't blame her at all. But acting like she should just silently suffer after that kind of abuse is just silly. I'm simply saying that now that she HAS come forward, she should hit up a lawyer and see if statute of limitations are applicable and if not, then sue the ever living shit out of LMG.
I know that I'm done watching LTT videos from here on out, but I did go back and look at the video about what it's like to work for Linus and honestly I don't know why I didn't see more of the red flags sooner.
This is an awful treatment of an employee and I don't know how many more cases like this are still existing at this moment. Fuck LTT, best I can do is step away from them and their content but if there is anything else I can do to get back at them let me know.
After I came forward about being assaulted, Someone accused Linus of inappropriate conduct on twitter.
He came over to my corner and started BERATING HER. Calling her insane, mentally ill, an attention seeker, and just digging into this poor woman who had felt wronged by him.
At least one more woman has received shit treatment from Linus, I believe this problem is endemic.
Unsubscribed from the LTT channel now. To be honest, I mainly followed it because I was amused this "tech influencer" borked his PC trying to install Pop_OS.
Oh yeah Linus just outright also lies to his audience about his experience:
At 2:04 he mentions that pacman? tries to install a dependency for "apt" and then quietly fails afterword and starts an infinite loop. This is the most absurd thing to mention because to my knowledge, nobody else was able to replicate this at all and theoretically this can't happen either because apt-get is not in your PATH on an Arch system.
He so benefits from his reputation and since general knowledge of POSIX and the current GNU/Linux software is virtually non-existent in his audience, he wasn't called out on it.
I watched LTT a lot until recently but that Linux challenge seemed like the first sign to me that they don't look at everything in good faith.
"Why doesn't Manjaro tell me it doesn't have APT installed" It's another OS, he acted like it's something you can just jump into without doing research. I know that wasn't his belief but it was his action.
Nobody in the Linux community will say it's as easy as Windows, even Linux Mint requires a good bit more know-how than the average "savvy" Windows user. Windows doesn't follow POSIX, Linux and its tools at least try to
Wow, that’s incredibly terrible, much worse than I could have imagined. I feel so bad for her, and so mad at the working environment at LTT. I started getting red flags when Linus kept bringing up his classic line “I feel like if my company unionized then I’ve failed” every other week on the WAN show. Unsubbed then because I thought he was being myopic in his little capitalist startup bubble, but no, turns out he’s just completely insufferable, and a union would have eventually led to a complete overhaul at LTT, if not lawsuits, something he would rather give up the CEO role to avoid.
Yeah that doesn't sound great at all. Must've been hard not to post all of this before, especially with people constantly asking. It seems like suddenly all kinds of issues at LTT boil over at once. They're going to need a change of direction and some well worded apologies in order to win back trust.
Personally I've started favouring boring big companies over cool flashy small companies to work for as well because of this kinda stuff. Having a very informal atmosphere definitely has it's plus sides when all goes well, but when you're in a (relatively) small company there's sometimes also a lack of professionalism all the way to the top. When you start running into problems you might very well run into the situation where nobody really takes your issues seriously, and because the company is small and everyone knows eachother well there's really noone to turn to. At least in big boring companies there seem to be protocols and a bit more distance between HR and the management.
Hindsight is 2020 and all, but I did always feel like something was a bit off with his demeanor (Linus). First I thought it was just his camera voice/personality, but now I'm thinking it's just him turned up (or down) a notch...
I’ve been watching fewer of their videos lately. The concerns from Tech Jesus had me sitting further on the fence but that thread got me to unsub. If even part of the thread is true, it’s unacceptable.
I'll watch it, but only as I believe LMG has a right to reply. Their response to these allegations will be critical.
If they are smart, they'll have a demonitised WAN show, where they acknowledge the issues and outline their path forward. If they can't do that, I'll unsub.
"Madison's allegations were heard, and this is what we have done, and what we will do in the future"
Fuck that, Linus is the problem and is turning out to be a way bigger problem than I could have imagined. I hope the talented people I enjoyed start their own things, but I'm not supporting anything LTT.
I can't imagine supporting someone that vile as long as they say 'sorry for mistreating my employees and ignoring sexual harassment, we'll do better'. Like come on, be better.
If Linus is the problem then I'm not gonna support him. But we don't know who the problem was, other than "upper management". You seem certain it is Linus, I am not so sure. For all I know it could be Yvonne. Jumping to conclusions about who did what is just as irresponsible as blindly following/trusting Linus.
Ultimately Linus is responsible as the head of the company, but if it wasn't his direct actions then I am not gonna hold it against him unless he runs from the problem.
To be clear, I am not doubting Madison's claims, I am just not reaching for the pitch forks either.
I do feel a bit icky about supporting the company where that kind of behaviour was allowed to flourish, and I hope (perhaps naively) that the individuals and behaviours are being appropriately addressed. Ultimately, it is up to LMG to prove to us that they have appropriately addressed them.
Edit: just read the bit about him chewing someone out publically in the office, definely not a good behaviour to be demonstrating. It's definitely a sign that something is not okay at the top.
Even if Yvonne or anyone else is solely responsible in upper management, so what? They fire that one person and everything is magically fine? What about that time where at least one person harassed an employee (and it sounds like it's multiple people doing it) and apparently literally everyone ignored it? This is a structural problem, sure there are ways harassers can get into positions of power but there should be no way for them to thrive in them. The instant she was harassed, in a sane company she should have been able to go to someone else in upper management and report that shit, the fact that nothing happened tells us nobody cared.
This on top of the overworking of employees means LMG is dead to me. There is nothing they can do to get out of this, they have been fucking around for years and now they're finding out.
No, I'm not saying that just firing the person makes it right. At best it's the start. I am saying that I want to see evidence of a cultural shift that ensures that what happened to Madison cannot happen again.
I 100% agree that its a structural problem, but that is a solvable problem if LMG really wants to fix it, it will cost money, time and likely require a lot of restructuring, but I don't believe it is impossible.
I'm not confident that will happen, I am just being open to the slim possibility of happening.
Absolutely, he is ultimately responsible for the environment that allowed it to happen. It doesn't mean he directly did the things being alleged. To me, Occam's could be applied as: The company has known internal communication issues, the lack of an appropriate response to Madison's treatment may stem from that.
And I also apply Hanlons as: Linus' company is being incompetently managed (by his own admission), whichallowed Madison's abuse to occur.
I'm not trying to absolve Linus of responsibility, he is ultimately responsible. But as long as he is not the direct cause of the problem, this is salvageable. Hiring the new CEO and getting their house in order will hopefully prevent this ever happening again.
I get their point as well though, these are very serious allegations, and something is very wrong. I feel terrible for Madison, this never should have happened.
It's worth considering that for some of the people commenting, they may have direct personal experience with these kind of problems, and their response is rightfully coloured by that. I am fortunate that I have not directly been impacted by this kind of workplace abuse, so it's a lot less personal.
I intend to believe people who speak out about their experiences. Victims had it hard enough and should be heard and trusted. People with similar experiences or supporting the claims almost always follow anyway.
The most recent is the cancellation of super mega. Matt came out with screenshots showing that everything the "victims" said was a lie.
Remember Gus Johnson being cancelled? He didn't do any of the things Sabrina accused him of.
Remember Pro Jared being cancelled by his wife and the cheater Hollie? He came out with a video debunking everything showing he was innocent and his wife and Hollie weren't.
Maybe you should let both sides speak before "believing people who speak out about their experiences". You're the problem.
I have no idea what you're speaking about and I'm not particularly inclined to look after these examples. The first thing you did was to insult me. Do you expect somebody to talk to you after that, in any meaningful way anyway?
We live in a patriarchy, women are grossly underrepresented and sexism is still the norm. So, yes, I give women the benefit of the doubt, because the history of women being abused is nothing new and the amount of that happening even today is not tolerable.
What I never wrote was that you have to believe everything at face value and to take out the pitch fork to manslaughter the oppressors.
Of course both sides should be heard. That is the whole point. Then problem is that victims are at a disadvantage, so it is important to take them seriously and to hear them.
People denying, downplaying or discouraging is what the problem is. People in power abusing people with no power is what the problem is.
But yeah, tell me that I'm the problem. Go on and call me an Idiot. I don't care. You could've written that what I wrote was wrong and why. We could have had a meaningful discussion. You chose not to.
You say that both sides should be heard but are not doing so yourself.
I'm honestly surprised they kept it around after the april fools thing, I thought they deleted it.
Really shitty of LTT to force Madison to maintain it regardless, allowing her to be on the recieving end of unsolicited sexual material from fans (some aimed at her) that she didn't want to read or see. That's really disgusting actually.
I swear I tried. I got ten screenshots/links in and then killed myself. I'm posting from the grave. Long live Lemmy. Infinite Twitter screenshot support was my dying wish for the fedi-verse. Bless you.
What the fuck!!! This was absolutely enraging to know. Linus is a piece of shit. I can't even comment on one specific thing as worse in the whole thread. Everything is fucked up about how they treated her.
fuck linus media group and fuck that motherfucker pretending to be a nice and friendly guy. How you treat your people behind closed doors is your character not the fake YouTube shit.
You should see the WAN show because he sometimes let's his true nature out. Even more so recently with the backpack drama and innaccuracies in videos. But there is one tell that he made a while ago, a few years now so it will be hard to find now, but he did mention how he is against "friendly banter being chided". Stuff like that easily snowballs into sexual harassment being brushed off, but since the tech bro audience didn't understand what that means, Linus never considered it a bad thing.
When a corporation has over 100 employees and millions of dollars to spend on purchasing a new facility, I stop caring about what their costs might be. They should unionize and fight to prevent this abuse from ever happening again
Ultimately, it just comes down to the fact that they've never respected her, not just as a woman, but as a human being, to be useful when convenient and ignored when not.
I choose to believe her, because it's something that is all too common in this world, but I don't think the world has to be this way.
This is some shit. I'm actually glad I didn't apply to do engineering work there now. I am realizing if this kind of stuff had happened to me I'd likely be fired because I would nip that shit in the bud immediately, if it happened to me or if I had seen it happening to someone else. It's not right.
Unsubscribed from all their channels the moment I heard of this. I don't think I'll be returning as a subscriber anytime soon, even if they address and fix this.
People have so much to say, that a blog post would have made more sense. Instead, they use a system with rediculous restrictions on the message size. Either the restrictions don’t serve the users or the users are doing it wrong. When pretty much everyone is bumping into this issue, I’m inclined to think there’s something wrong with the system.
Twitter started with a 140 character limit as that was what SMS messages originally were limited to (and still are, but phones can send and combine them seamlessly), as that was the original way to access it. It has since been updated to 240 characters iirc, but the idea still is that it's a microblog where readers don't have to read novels worth from each of the people they follow, and for longer content you write it on your own blog and link to it. But in the age of social media, hardly anyone has one anymore and you end up with this.
On Mastodon, you can pick an instance with a higher limit. The one I’m on has a limit of something like five essays worth of characters. Vast majority of messages are around 100-500 characters, but occasional you see someone actually put that higher limit to good use. I think Twitter/X has a limit that doesn’t really match the current need people have. I do understand the historical background behind it, but I don’t think that’s a good reason to keep dragging this historical baggage around.
I've always got bad vibes from LTT. He seemed like he always had a "bigger than you" attitude about everything. The things mentioned here exceeded my already existing opinions about him.
Can't wait to watch Linus fumble over the explanation of this one. I'm sure it'll just be a lot of deflection and not-so-subtle victim blaming, but at this point he needs to squirm. Can't pawn it off on "the new CEO."
Wow... That's pretty damning stuff. Hope she's doing better now, and shame on LTT/LMG.
Sounds like they have no real HR and force people to burn out. The sexist stuff is absolutely horrible.
I've been a fan for years and even went to LTX this year (I had a few issues with the expo but put it down to the companies inexperience doing expos), but I think I'll be unsubscribing now.
I’m assuming they are talking about the GamersNexus video that went over their concerns about ethics and quality of LTT content a few days ago. There was also a follow-up segment in a more recent video addressing Linus’ response to the first video.
I've read this all the way through now and this is just crazy to me. I honestly expected LTT to give too much work to their employees and have tight deadlines. I've thought that for years. However I'd never think that it was this bad. From verbal assault to sexual assault. It's just way worse than I thought
It is difficult to discern whether this is malice or Linus just being too incompetent, emotionally directed, & aloof to actually run LMG. He should have thought much more carefully before scaling to where they are now.
Holly shit! That was terrible. Would be really disappointed to LTT if this turn out to be true. Maybe I should start calling them Linus Touch Tips (the inappropriate one)
From the first day I got suggested the guy and blocked his channel I never liked the man. Seemed fake and off. Finding out he’s a total asshole clownboy makes sense.
I don't know much about LTT, but companies where you have a preponderance of young white guys, this is invariably the culture. If you're a young white guy, work hard to be sure you're not part of the problem.
So the situation is getting even crazier now. Someone pointed out this particular part in Madison's thread:
After I came forward about being assaulted, Someone accused Linus of inappropriate conduct on twitter.
He came over to my corner and started BERATING HER. Calling her insane, mentally ill, an attention seeker, and just digging into this poor woman who had felt wronged by him.
Apparently this correlates with the Naomi Wu a.k.a "Sexy Cyborg" case. When visiting China in 2018, Linus was supposed to work on a project with her. He wanted to discuss her joining Floatplane as a content creator and offered meeting in a hotel one of them was staying at. A misunderstanding came upon, where he intended to meet her to talk in the lobby, and she thought he was talking about a hotel room, that is her sleeping with him to get the contract. She told her how uncomfortable he made her feel and the misunderstanding was immediately cleared.
In 2021 she yet again accused him of "back then just wanting a blowjob for the contract" and also of removing Yvonne from the cc thread to hide infidelity. Linus was furious and this is what Madison is referring to. Linus then proved his version of the story by releasing the correspondence that the misunderstanding was temporary and not only that, but also that Yvonne was on the e-mail chain all along and this was a lie as well.
Again, the hotel misunderstanding took place in 2018, was immediately resolved, but was falsely brought up again in 2021 and now, another 2 years later Madison seems to be ignoring the facts she must have been aware of, even if not at the moment the "berating" she refers to took place, but definitely learned Naomi's accusations were false at some point between 2021 and her releasing the Twitter statement last week. I would argue this does shine a new light on her accusations and perhaps we shouldn't have taken these at face value until the investigation (""""investigation"""") concludes and perhaps authorities get involved.
In other news, a four months-old Billet Labs' in-house benchmark surfaced, which confirmed Linus' original conclusion of the review. Again, this does not prove they did nothing wrong in the process, but perhaps his decision to not re-test the monoblock thing was not a mood after all, and actually an informed guess from someone who knows what they are doing.
I feel like an old lady following celebrity gossip but I now understand why they love the drama. Or bumfights rather
What strikes me as odd is that no other employee at LMG has come out with allegations of this kind of environment. With the number of staff they have right now and even more people who don't work there anymore, surely someone else would step forward if it was this bad? The crunch and overwork is confirmed of course, but the illegal stuff like sexual harassment and breach of contract seems like it would have multiple people blowing whistles if not filing lawsuits.
Not sure if it's been brought up here... But on their newest video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0cTpTMl8kFY) They don't address this at all. And if you try to bring it up in the comments, they get deleted/purged. Pretty shady to actively go out and censor this. Not a good look for LMG at all.
I've made purchases from their store... I get asked all the time about the screwdriver and backpack. Now I feel like shit for supporting them. Now the conversation will need to have a caveat everytime.. "It's a good product... but the company is a toxic ". And that's just sad.
I'm more inclined to trust this account than I am with others because there's a lot of things she mentioned which are quite synonymous with the 'tech bro' industry:
My work was called "dogshit" I was called "incompetent". When I would reach out to managers and try to get help with these situations, I would be told to "put on my big girl pants" and be "more assertive".
However, I will withhold my judgement until I hear both sides of the story like always. I also don't know why she didn't press criminal charges, I'm sure sexual assault is a crime in Canada and you won't have to pay legal fees like she mentioned towards the end. And one more thing, she should have mentioned these "managers", "certain members", and alleged sex offenders by name.
Given she was self-harming to get out of work she probably didn't have the frame of mind to pursue criminal charges, and just wanted to put it all behind her.
The unfortunate reality is that we will probably never hear the full story. I hope these are the actions of some other manager, who was dealt with, but we just won't ever know or find out.
This is why companies of all sizes need a seperate HR department, so these problems don't ever escalate as described. I hope LMG gets a HR department with teeth and they can grow and move past this, but it looks pretty grim. Maybe this can be the change that the new CEO can institute.
I don't really care about the quality issues, it's not why I watch LTT vids anyway. They are entertainment first, factual second. When labs is live I'll worry about the quality.
But issues such as the ones described can really spoil their image, and I don't want to watch content associated with those kind of problems.
I’ve been in the workforce for 30 years. I’ve never seen anything even close to this happen anywhere I have worked, I haven’t heard stories about it from my friends either.
But we aren’t tech bros.
The circumstantial evidence seems to suggest that the tech industry has a big problem with this kind of sexual assault and sexual harassment. Why? I have no idea.
But that industry needs to take account of this and hold themselves to a higher standard. Getting support for this is probably hard for lemmy users because many of them are probably tech bros themselves and possibly blind to this sort of thing happening in their workplaces too.
Def seems like the rumblings around tech culture and sexism has some teeth though
I have seen this kind of shit happen. The shock factor is another reason why it is so hard to talk about. All around people kept saying "I've worked in this field for N years and never saw shit like this". It happens, and it is fucking everywhere. Some of us don't encounter it, but it is there. There is a real law of silence around these systems.
Or you aren't someone that woman deem as safe to talk to about this.
Sexual harassment and sexual violence happen all over the world and in every industry. Just think about how many people react when they hear something like this and that will make it clear why the victims often don't talk to anyone (or only a few people they see as safe) about this.
If you never saw something anywhere close to this and you've NEVER been told something like this by a friend the chances are pretty high that they just never told you.
Sure that depends on what exactly you mean by "anything close to this", but when you look up sexual harrasment statistics it's pretty much impossible.
Also there is the possibility that you read those situations very differently, as you said some people are blind to it so you should consider the possibility that you are blind to it yourself.
The circumstantial evidence seems to suggest that the tech industry has a big problem with this kind of sexual assault and sexual harassment. Why? I have no idea.
Nerds with problematic ideas about women who suddenly get power over women. That’s it.
It might just be because I am so out of the loop of social media posts but that amount of posts seems easily attainable daily maybe 2 hours of time out of an 8 hour workday? Wondering if it's just me? I agree that it isnt the "fun" job even if it might seem to be.
I can totally see it happening. Everyone there seems to be worked well beyond reasonable limits. Some people who would otherwise think before they speak don't really have time to pay attention to what they are doing outside of trying to get content and edits out the door.
I think there was favouritism and misogyny, and senior management were definitely treating this person poorly and singling them out for "causing drama".
Others in the company were too overworked probably to notice, stop and support this person as well. I feel terribly sorry for them, but I can't help but think that if they'd loosened up on the pace of getting content done, if they might have been able to address it better on the whole without subjecting the person through all that trouble.
I almost want to believe that it's some kind of coordinated attack to stop them from building the testing facilities, because big tech doesn't want independent data to be gathered.
Unfortunately, the truth is almost certainly way simpler, rich tech bros being rich tech bros.
If someone self harmed to avoid work that tells us alot of their mental state and how they see the world and how they will recall events. I.E. how reasonable their perception of the world is.
I'm not saying they are wrong, but it is the framework reasonable people will have to use when investigating the incidents. At this point the Canadian equilivent of a labor board must look into it.
Self harm is an extreme thing to do, which tells us this is an extreme personality.
If you ever feel the need to self harm to avoid a situation at work, please seek immediate help, both through the labor board, and from family and friends. Use your nextwork to immediately exit the situation.
How great of a creator can he really be if he overworks and harasses his employees?
I suggest you go watch some actually great creators, like gamersNexus, who consistently stands up for consumers and for his employees, like hardware unboxed, who isn't afraid of pushing back against the corporations that arguably allow him to have a platform, like jayztwocents, who visibly strives to make the best product he can and almost always delivers.
So anyone can post a wall of allegations with zero proof and the retards here all take it as fact. Even if it were all true, the way you people jump to conclusions demonstrates the kind of fan base required to keep a company like LTT profitable through all their sloppy content.
12 Hours ago, Linus thought he just pissed off some GPU fanatics. This morning he wakes up to see how his apology video is doing, only to learn he's pissed off all of SIMP Nation. Jeeeez.
She picked the right moment to come out with this. I mean, keeping this in for 2 whole years while being under the impression that you're under some NDA, you can only imagine how stressful she must've felt.
I feel really sorry for her and I wish her the best. She's a really cool person.
That's usually how these things work. People see others speaking out against someone, and that gives them the courage that they'll be heard.
It also helps that the current news only does to back up her claims and increase the perceived validity.
It's sad people have to wait for these opportunities to come, if at all. Otherwise people would dismiss them as a liar or disgruntled employee. There are too many sycophants even now that will back Linus no matter what.
I think the LMG stans are super weird. People who pay for their premium floatplane stuff and pay just to be able to chat with others who pay
It's all very weird to me.
I assume most of those people will stay behind and create an echo chamber of Linus simping for him to view.
I was a floatplane subscriber for quite a while. All of this stuff over the past week has made me rethink it all and I just can’t support it. Unsubscribed.
You really had me in the first half there.
I feared you'd continue with "how convenient for her to get attention now", like people (especially women) are treated when they come out about abuse.
Thank you for being empathetic
It's best not to assume the worst of people right away, especially those that you do not know personally. This happens too often on the internet and by extension, in real life. It can be hard to do that, I know, but the more people that do it, the better it is for everyone.
It would have been, but she's apparently been posting about this for a while, only for it to come to light relatively organically.
Madison has been talking about this for awhile now. Dig up old tweets and posts and she's definitely mentioned sexual harassment since she left LTT. No one paid attention until now.
Yep, she even said as much in here. People kept asking her about this and only now she gets the attentions that she deserves. It absolutely sucks.
This is, quite frankly, atrocious.
Horrifying more like. I hope she is okay though. Linus fan boys will wreak havoc.
This is worse than the Gamer's Nexus video. The biggest red flag initially wasn't even the bad testing data, it was how overworked the staff were. Clearly employee wellness is not a priority.
The Gamer’s Nexus video was necessary for others to speak out. Steve was clear that speaking up was a move that could backfire due to the power imbalance involved. Had he not spoken up there would be no opportunity for Madison to weigh in her experiences without being attacked.
Linus sounds pretty consciously malicious to me...
expired
But guys, Linus swears there’s no need for a union. He’ll just wield the power responsibly and with care, unlike all those other people.
This is not my thesis but someone else’s but as a counterpoint to this platitude, look at the difference between Lincoln versus Nixon. Both were leaders at pivotal times but they took very different ethical directions. Sometimes character and background DOES matter and we SHOULD expect more of our leaders. Just assuming they will all be corrupt makes up disengage from the process.
Wha what video?
https://youtu.be/FGW3TPytTjc
None of this is surprising to me at all. I’ve been seeing hints of a toxic ‘hustle’ mindset in their videos for quite some time and have commented as much on the videos. I’ve worked in environments just like this and once you’ve lived it it’s easy af to spot.
Linus probably says ‘I don’t ask anything of anyone that I don’t expect of myself’ and then goes on to expect someone making 50k to put in as much time and effort as he did when first starting LTT/LMG.
My comment on the forums was very similar.
The key issue in all of this that they didn't address is that they're pushing too fast. There have been many red flags about Linus pushing people too hard to get stuff done too fast.
It doesn't matter what kind of "new processes" you put in place if people just don't have time. And you can't expect every employee to work as though they have 20% equity in the company. If you put more than 30 hours of work per week onto a full time, salaried employee, you're not going to get their best work, especially in creative or expertise-required jobs.
To do their best work, people need time to breathe. They need time to be able to talk to their coworkers about a problem without worry about pulling them away from their own work for 15 minutes. They need time to grab a drink or a sandwich while they step back from a problem and consider it from a distance. They need time to decide their previous work wasn't good enough and to go back and redo it. They shouldn't have to ask. Having to ask is a problem. Getting "no" back as an answer is an even bigger problem.
If you try to account for every 15 minutes, you're going to get shit quality product pushed out the door.
Madison brought this up. Employees have brought this up in videos. And Linus has raised red flags more than once. The biggest was with his equating doing things right to hours worked and directly to cash. That speaks to exactly this. People don't have time to do things right, and they don't have time to fix things.
The only way to fix this is to either hire more people (which you clearly can't afford), or allow your current people to put out less product.
Facts. If you claim you can work more than ~30 maybe 40 hours (that's really pushing it) a week in this type of work without output/quality falling off a cliff, you have lots of room for process automation from my experience. I don't think I do more than ~15-20 hours of actual active programming per week. If I have hard deadlines, pushing that out to 60-80 hours does increase output but nowhere close to linear output.
And as other people said, she was expected to output that much social media posts, but now they post the bare minimum. Maybe she was being asked too much after all.
You don't hire your partner as the head of HR unless you want to hide a bad work enviroment.
Right? How do you go to HR if he harasses you? Yeah so I know y'all live together but like it's really bad?
Oh I thought she was head of accounting. I didn’t realize HR. Conflict of interest much?
You're right actually. Point still stands somewhat, the whole thing is fucked
Didn't Coulton mention HR was his purview?
U do that when u think its a stupit position that doesnt really mather when u got a company of 10 to 20 people. When u hire lets say 90 poeple it starts to breakdown.
Stopped watching years ago because something about the videos were starting to put me off. Now I know.
She has also confirmed that this Glassdoor review was written by her, with continuing updates on her twitter
Permalink to Glassdoor
Quote from the twitter thread:
Holy cow I thought the screenshots currently on this post were the whole thing and I was horrified??
No, the screenshots are like, half?? THE TAME HALF????
Same.
I was like, huh seems like she was overworked I guess I wonder why there's so many comments... Oh fuck.
Holy shit wtf
I figured it was stressful there, and I always kind of dismissed the dickheads in the community as “the internet being the internet” but it seems it’s WAY worse.
Man what the fuck kind of attitude is that??
They sound like a bunch of immature misogynistic little pricks.
Honestly? Considering how some members of the team act on camera I'm willing to believe they are immature misogynistic little pricks
What the actual fuck. This is starting to sound like FTX
Someone share the glassdoor post here pretty please? They've got a login wall
1.0 Jul 27, 2022
Disappointed with treatment would not recommend
Social Media Coordinator
Former Employee, more than 1 year
X Recommend
O CEO Approval
X Business Outlook
Pros
a lot of talented people
employee bonding activities
Cons
No proper/or explained HR system.
Sexist remarks, coded language, and harassment were common place.
Inappropriate actions, comments, and discussions frequently occurred.
Including discussion about employees bodies, appearance, clothes, and wealth.
Upper/middle management frequently misuse power.
No way to report most incidents without issue, since the HR team was ALSO upper management.
Feedback was consistently harsh and not constructive.
Inappropriate language was commonly used while giving feedback.
Meetings with unbalanced power dynamics were common place.
Gaslighting situations frequently occurred.
Unbiased 3rd parties were never present, or easily able to be requested in these meetings.
Lack of proper communication between management and employees.
Outside ventures frequently frowned upon, or limited by the company.
Advice to Management
Stop dismissing complaints because "everyone is friends here" it's a workplace, not a group hangout session.
Get a proper HR team and take reports of harassment and inappropriate conduct seriously.
Don't dismiss employees complaints.
Thank youu!
Just an fyi, you can get past the wall using reader mode in Firefox and
glassdoor.com^*/gd-hardsellin ublock origin's filters. Reader mode is necessary if you want to see full reviews, the ublock rule is to stop the "please login" popup
Imgur blocking VPNs again. Ugh.
What the actual fuck.
fucking absolute disgusting.
😧
Okay.
This is not your conventional toxic workplace. This is ADVANCED toxicity. She resorted to self harm for a day off. That's a type of struggle that can make a company go terminal if the rank and file band together.
This needs to be spread.
Im sorry, but that is conventional toxic workplace. Or ive just heard a lot of horror stories from people.
This supports the notion that the issues with quality are due to overextended teams. It sounds like yet another workplace where upstairs decisions are made without consulting the people who will actually do the work, and so the rank and file have to constantly scramble to make up for that. I feel like LTT leadership decided a velocity of content to support certain goals rather than what their resources can actually do.
... And it also seems like they have not outgrown the "early joiners can do whatever they want to whomever they want" problem that plagues companies like this.
I mean we already knew their staff was overextended, and that upper management has been pushing for velocity at the expense of quality. This has been self evident by the myriad of issues pointed out in Steve's video.
What wasn't already apparent was how horrendously abusive of a workplace LMG appears to actually be. This is quite literally shocking and I honestly think most of the commenters are underreacting, lol.
This poor girl was sexually assaulted by coworkers/management on multiple occasions. Verbally abused regularly. And she had to self harm to a degree that she needed to go to the ER just to TAKE A DAY OFF FROM WORK.
I used to work in tech myself, and I've heard some horror stories, especially from women in tech. But this is among the worst. If all this is true, LMG is a horrific, toxic, abusive organization and I hope they get sued into the ground.
It's been a while since I regularly watched LMG content, so I wasn't really aware of how many videos they were churning out. Looking at it now, I would assume their staff was much larger than it is.
Ironically, the harassment/assault/retaliation stuff is the one area they'd benefit from being a bit more corporate. Obviously they aren't capable of ending it for the purposes of basic human decency. Maybe a liability approach would get through...
Similar to the Amazon "disagree and commit" policy which, if you didn't know, means you can/should disagree if you feel that way and then you should fall in line and shut up.
If the allegations about the sexual topics are true (like managing the OnlyFans account and having to see other people's junk, being told to twerk for a coworker and getting asked about "how she liked to fuck") LTT is in some serious trouble.
No sponsor in their right mind wants to be associated with a bunch of grown men sexually assaulting their female coworkers. If this isn't cleared up totally and publically, LTT will lose a lot of sponsors and this can seriously hurt them.
When the employee handbook leaked a few months ago and this was mostly ignored by Linus except him making a rant about the company not needing unions because they're so great, that was already very suspicious to me. It seemed like just another hustle culture company trying to sweep things under the rug. Well, looks like it was not just a feeling...
Hot damn. That's not just toxic but straight up abusive and the more you hear about Linus as a person the worse it gets too.
Linus has admitted to bullying others when he was younger, guess that side of him never went away. Just good at hiding it or editing out of public view. I'm looking back now wondering if he even properly compensated his employees for doing what should have been CONTRACT work on his house or just what they would have made from the videos so he could profit off free labor.
Definitely unsubscribing from all their channels. All of that shit is absolutely disgusting.
I had wondered what happened to her and why she seemed to rarely be in any content despite having a good camera presence. It sucks that she had to put up with all that. Linus should have put in his big boy pants and fired the shit heads that helped create such a toxic work environment. He clearly does not know how to manage a company.
From the thread, Linus is part of the problem.
Linus is the problem. It’s a top down problem, and he’s the one at the top. Everything stems from time and lack of it to resolve issues correctly. When you don’t have time to deal with things and more things get requested of you, it’s human nature to try to downplay or discredit their importance.
You cannot excuse this with time. Taking this to a marginal extreme to demonstrate the point - you don't dismiss a report that one of your employees shot another because you don't have the time for it.
You’re right, I meant more that over worked people don’t clearly think things through like they should, but this really is of that level where it’s a bad excuse regardless.
Reading the full thread was stressful enough, I don't even want to image what it was like to live it.
Now I understand why the company is so against unionizing, all this stuff would pretty quickly explode in their face. It's straight up abuse that should be met by the full force of the legal system.
What the fuck is wrong with people that makes them think that if you have the smallest modicum of power over someone else it's your god given right to be an asshole, a sexual predator or just generally toxic.
I don't get it.
His Union comments are just tone deaf. He’s not wrong that it would be a failure on the company if people felt they needed to unionize. It doesn’t need to be said. Clearly he didn’t think he treated his employees badly, but here we are.
No; what, he’s exactly wrong in saying that! Regardless on your thoughts on unions, that’s never something that a CEO/Founder should say about their company, first because it’s just incredibly stupid like you noted, but also because it’s the biggest red flag that you DO need to unionize ASAP!
At the end of the day, Linus was trying to sell ‘we don’t need a union because we’re the cool workplace’, but it’s always been because unions, by definition, dilute the power of people in his position, which I’m sure he feels very threatened by, especially the longer he built this Jenga tower.
And if you think that companies that are unionized are a sign of failure… well, I don’t know how to address that without pulling out my own hair.
I have not agree in so far that workers who decide to unionize usually do it because their company has wronged them. I don’t recall hearing of a workplace trying to unionize that are completely happy.
I’m really glad I didn’t purchase that stupid screwdriver now.
Everyone saying this isn't malice, it fucking is. All of this is done out of malice. He is angry his employees don't treat this like their day 1 dream and give their entire 45k/yr soul to the brand. He is upset that people would even dare question their products. He is furious that employees would have the gall to expect time off.
It is malice, it always has been. Capitalist hold everyone in contempt, especially employees. It is the easiest thing in the fucken world to take a little less profit from your pocket and add it to the people who actually make your company run. None of these fucks do it because they hate their own employees. They don't want humans working for them, they want cheap drones that follow their every
wordintention. The people at the top of any company fucking hate they have to pay you at all. Accept that. That is reality.Holy shit.
So much of what she says is not just horrifying (seriously, feeling the need to hospitalize yourself for a day off), but also straight up illegal.
Retribution, hostile work environment, straight up harassment, not to mention evidence of "constructive dismissal". (I'm using US terms but I know these have equivalent laws in Canada)
I've had some pretty bad jobs that have destroyed my mental health, but none of them come close to what Madison is describing here and I am so happy that this is coming out. This is the sort of thing people need to know about LTT and LMG.
Honestly, that's a much larger issue to me than the beef with GN. Forcing the image of a super cool liberal easy company while being as shitty as every other bigger greedy firm. So sad.
I'll start with: I believe Madison.
I honestly did not even know that she had left, so all of this is news to me. I assumed that she went into a role that suited what she wanted to do (like production or editing or something with no significant on camera time), and was still there. I usually avoid following anything so closely that I'm aware of whatever drama they get into. Which isn't to imply that Madison's experience is mere drama, because it's not. This is an egregious HR violation on all fronts, and bluntly, if Madison still has any evidence of any of this, a lawyer would do well to pick up her case at no cost to Madison; as far as I'm concerned, with any level of evidence, especially right now with the PR nightmare they're currently weathering, they'll want to settle quickly (if they have any sense left in their heads whatsoever).... And Madison can walk away with a very reasonable pay off for all this mental anguish.
Of course, money doesn't un-do the fact that it happened.
On the surface, to me, this looks like LMG hired Madison to appease the masses, partly evidenced by the fact that he announced that he had done so before she was even made aware that they were interested in bringing her on board, which seems to be a trend with Linus now - saying things have happened when he simply rubber stamps the approval to go ahead and start the process.... Then "allowed" her to appear on camera enough to show that yes, she does work here... Then as the hype from fans died down and stopped being a benefit to the company, slowly berated her into leaving quietly so schmucks like me (anyone that's not so dedicated that they read the LTT forums daily), are unaware, and they don't lose viewers.
The workload described, at first didn't sound too bad, busy, sure, but not bad. Some Twitter posts, FB posts, a few tiktoks daily... Yeah ok. That's a fairly reasonable bar to set, a little high IMO, but ok.... Then she went on. And on.... And on.... What the fuck? I get the idea that it's "only social media" so some think it's "not really like working" (which I don't agree with, I just understand why people think that), since managing your own social media is fairly trivial, but when managing it for someone else, you have to constantly check yourself and consider "is this me saying it? Or is this the right tone and perspective for what the company would say?" Because if you say the wrong thing, you're reprimanded, or fired. That kind of mental gymnastics is rough; and having to do that for a dozen posts a day is a lot of work to accomplish alone, and you're probably going to make some mistakes unless you can bounce the posts off of someone like a long term employee or manager to make sure that the message isn't straying from the brand you represent.
I've personally been in plenty of scenarios where I've been over worked. It happens. When being overworked is basically your job duties, that's unreasonable in every way.
On top of that the dismissive and demeaning treatment isn't going to help. I'm not surprised that Madison noped the fuck out, and it's sad that happened, and more sad that she felt that she shouldn't even say anything. It's unsurprising that she left and that she had such a major impact to her mental health by being there... Honestly, it's almost surprising that she stayed as long as she did.... And this isn't even addressing the sexual misconduct. I know for me, when I think "sexual assault" I'm thinking the worst case scenario, and bluntly, some of the comments that she relays (like "you've never gotten drunk with us") makes me think that could have happened... But it's not exclusive to that. This is sexual assault. She was sexually harassed and sexually assaulted by staff and bluntly, I hope she names and shames those who were involved. This is unacceptable in any and every way in the workplace and everywhere else. Madison's gender, sexual orientation, preferences, history, everything, is entirely personal, and discussions of such things in a workplace is completely unacceptable. If she wanted to offer up such information of her own volition, sure, but berating her about it, and harassing or demeaning her about it is completely unwelcome both socially, and legally.
IMO, Madison has a legal case if she ever chooses to pursue it.... I think she should but I understand why she hasn't, and isn't.
As for LTT and LMG, I'm extremely disappointed that Madison was set up to fail like this. I get that it's a bit of a boys locker room, where most of the staff are "one of the guys" regardless of who they are or what gender they are, and ribbing is part of that. Clearly this was above and beyond it and from what people said to Madison after she left, her treatment was worse than most.... Well beyond a good ribbing, and others could tell. Anyone who participates in ribbing among friends can recognise when they've gone too far. IMO, it was clear that they had, and they just kept doing it. No part of that is ok. The staff then took it further and further into sexual harassment and assault, and the management team was complacent. This is wholly unacceptable on LMG's side. Their behaviour is reprehensible.
I hope Madison is doing better. I'll probably track down her twitch and throw her a sub, because she deserves it, and never deserved to be treated the way she was. I don't know what she's doing now, but I wish her all the success in the world.
Alright, time to unsubscribe from their channels. Already started to dislike Linus when he went all Anti-Union and stuff, but this is truly disgusting.
I had heard Linus' anti-union remarks on WAN Show and was slightly weirded out, because I don't believe for a second that a company owner AND manager of a company much smaller than theirs has enough time and resources to really be in touch with what their workers need, even if they have the best intentions.
There once was a WAN Show segment about quiet quitting and his fear that people might do that and it came across as if he was more scared that his employees might do it and thereby "hurt the company" than him being interested in why people feel compelled to only work the minimum amount required. As if he was expecting people to always give him 110%.
Even 90% is enough, that's just reality. If you have people working for you full time, you can't just pay them for their most productive and focused time. There's also socializing with coworkers, taking short breaks and being creative without direct output. It's all part of being a team. A good and healthy team that feels appreciated can take up extra work and make short extra bursts as they become necessary, but that can never be the expected normal.
There was also some WAN Show segment about compensation, free time and the likes that was weird. Maybe it was part of one of the upper two, I don't quite remember. It's a bit fuzzy but I remember that I was a little surprised that they operated on the same scheme of low amount of days off + limited sick days system that many US/North-American companies seem to run on. I get that it's normal in that part of the world, but I still had this idea in my head that they were somehow different. It all felt so quirky, close-knit and best-buddy-like in the videos. That made me think that they were somehow more progressive and worker focused than it turns out after all.
Hearing these allegations is like finding that missing puzzle piece and suddenly it fits into a much bigger picture. I had a lot of respect for Linus and his company and really believed that they were "better". I really like their content, it is super entertaining and of very consistent quality. They are experts at making things accessible and interesting for a broader audience. But they are also running in a giant hamster wheel that is the youtube algorithm and several daily uploads.
Very sad to see how all this could happen. Even worse is how all of this is being handled. They need a proper restructuring because these problems seem to be structural and deep-rooted. I wish Madison all the best!
Edit: Typos
I feel so much better now, using uBlock and SponsorBlock watching their videos. I knew something was off when Linus started with the Anti-Union talks. Fuck this little bastard.
And yesterday I thought the GN video was serious business. Damn.
This person waited until a moment where they felt that people would believe their story.
I don't blame them for it at all, even if I think they should have retained legal counsel over a year ago. Linus would have come to the immediate defensive, calling it a one-off and I could see many of the die-hard fans siding with Linus.
This story is far from unique. Women deal with this shit constantly in the workplace. The vast majority never report because the police and courts don’t take them seriously either. It’s like collectively they just deal with it, and that’s absolutely heartbreaking.
I wouldn't say that she waited, an endless amount of woman and people in general will experience similar things and the public will never know about it.
There is a good chance she took the only opportunity to tell the public what happened to her.
Making this comment because I think it's important to be careful with language when we talk about stuff like this.
Holy shit. I stopped watching about when she quit (not for a reason, the content was just stale) but between this and the recent issues raised by GN o don't think watching LTT is relevant nor even ethical at this point.
When did she quit?
About 2 years ago
wait, it's already been so long since her original build video?
Well, this is pretty fucking horrific if true.
Setting aside the factual accuracy of LTT content (which is a separate discussion entirely), the main thing that they did well and that I generally enjoyed was their brand of jank content - like building impractical virtualized gaming setups, stupid water cooling projects, stuff like that.
If even a handful of these accusations hold water then I would no longer be able to enjoy that content knowing what took place behind the scenes in the process of creating it.
If all of them turn out to be true...I am neither Canadian nor a lawyer but it sounds like charges could be brought. In that case I don't see any way that trust in LTT/LMG could be rebuilt outside of some major team members stepping down.
From this day forward, I will finish every email with these words.
It's Test Kitchen stuff all over again. Corporate capitalist culture repetitively turns lovely and bright stuff about something innocuous and innocent like food or computers into exploitation, greed, harassment, and misery.
I'd die for claire saffitz of the
bon appetit test kitchendessert person kitchenMan, I'd almost forgotten about that. What a shitshow. At least a few of the creators seem to be doing OK with their individual channels now.
Jesus fucking Christ. Messing up a review, selling a prototype then repaying the company is just unprofessional, this is a whole other fucking level ! It's going to be hard to keep watching their videos after that, especially considering the two of them building a PC was my favourite one.
TBH, I'm not surprised. Linus stance on unions is really weird... My interest in LTTs videos has anyway declined in the last time, maybe I'll take a break and hope they really change some things.
Props to Madison for speaking out about this!
Been a union member at my workplace for 20years, they only give a shit about pay increases for the workers and Linus pays his workers above minimum wage which is what the union would ask for.
In this economic climate no one will strike for just one person when it's those members that are part of the problem.
Unions aren't what they used to be and shouldn't be treated as such.
Your union sucks then. Unions have done all sorts of things besides get more pay. They fight for benefits like vacation and sick time, make sure you can't be fired without cause, ensure good work/life balance, make your job physically safe, and help bad management be held accountable.
Striking isn't the only tool in a union's répertoire. They'll also do things like help pay for lawyers to fund legal action (hard to do as an individual) and negotiate on your behalf. Most people don't want to be negotiators (especially the most vulnerable) The union does that undesirable work for you and can often hire experts to do it.
Work to rule is an alternative to striking that is similar but keeps you working. That's doing exactly what your contract says and nothing more (eg, bus drivers have done it by not collecting fares, but still driving their routes; teachers have done it by only teachong their classes without doing any extra coaching or supervision on the side). And since your comment suggests that people won't strike because they can't go without pay, they can also pay you for the duration of a strike.
I know your paid for a strike but not at full pay and people are stupid and live paycheck to paycheck.
In our industry (mining) the government is alot more strict then the union ever is about safety or the government will remove the mining lease and shit the place down (been done to other pits in the area).
We work a rotating roster that the company sent to the union during EA talks and they said yeah that's fine without consulting the workforce, and it's been that way since and trying to get the older guys to change to a better roster is a nightmare.
Sick leave and vacation time is government mandated.
You might live in a destopian country with a shitty government but our unions ride the arse of the governments country wide employment mandates and then say they do alot.
Unions have been stripped of power repeatedly and told to fuck off by governments repeatedly.
In Australia it couldn't be a more true statement.
But I also think it depends on your union, right?
Still better a weak union than no union at all
It also depends on the country they're in, union culture is still stronger in Canada vs the USA... Heck, labor laws exist everywhere in Canada, just that is a step ahead of the US...
Unions still have a lot more upside than downside and should be treated as such.
I'm not going to put one union on a pedestal for the sake of other unions as there is alot of shitty unions out there.
On the flipside, you also shouldn't use one bad union to drag down the concept of unions in general.
I never stated I wasonly ever in one union I only stated I have been a union member for near 20years. There has been 3 different unions at my workplace and this 3rd union isn't any better then the other 2.
Yes unions have gotten workplaces alot better over the last 100 years, but in the last 15years governments have stripped union powers effectiveness. In Australia most of the benifits unions have gotten have been put into law making 1/2 - 3/4 of what they do not anything different to legal requirements making them only good for pay increases and then calling them "benefits for the employees" and in our case in our last EA agreement it was extremely sub par us members forced the union to go back 3 times for a 2% pay increase per year over 5 years.
You're the union, it's not separate from the workers, it is the workers. Not happy with what the union is doing? Get involved.
Here’s a link to the thread: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1691693740254228741.html
Really damning stuff.
Thanks, added to the post.
If she name drops, shit is really going to fly. But she should only do that if she has proof of who said it. I hope she does. Because if all that's true (and lets be honest, Linus has regularly been fine with showing how toxic of a boss he is on camera, so it's very likely all true) LMG should burn to the ground.
Getting your employees to work on your house? Definitely paid them fairly, right guys?
That whole thing was so cringeworthy...
All the previous proof put a dent in their brand but these allegations are actually brand destroying. Linus is evidently an asshole to his workers in his videos so I don't have a hard time believing her allegations. What a fucking dumpster fire.
Oof. I wasn’t too bothered about tech bros shanking each other in name of ethics in tech YouTubing. But this is absolutely unacceptable. I believe Madison. If there is no confirmation from Linus that whoever sexually assaulted and otherwise degraded her has been fired so fast their fucking eyes are spinning then I’m unsubscribing. I will not be watching videos every week where I’m trying to figure out who the creep is.
who is this maniac that asked this question and made these requests
this person should be fired asap otherwise others may leave as well
I'm happy Madison took her mental health and self-respect above the job
Wow. What a motherfucking piece of shit company. And Linus is also personally a piece of shit too (see screenshots below). Hope this means the end for LTT on YouTube. Note that the full thread is on Twitter here where she has responded to a few tweets that add further details.
This is pretty distressing to read. I am wondering if the upper management referred to is Linus, or someone else. Doesn't really matter much, the buck ultimately stops with him.
It doesn't sound like the kind of culture that Luke would tolerate, and I can't imagine Luke standing by Linus for that either.
It is worth pointing out that there is nothing Linus can do to respond either, if he was responsible he is hardly gonna own it, and if it was another upper management then he probably can't publically name them either. And there is no way any of us can know what is really happening. Madison is basically the only one who can pass judgement. I am very curious as to how Emily has been treated, especially after coming out, but she has a right to privacy and doesn't have to answer to any of us.
I guess the only real answer is for Tarren CEO to rapidly implement a proper HR department and provide a proper recourse. And if Linus is the direct cause of these issues, then really there is nothing that can be done.
I also can't help but wonder about Taran (the macro king). He left LMG like a year ago and he obviously doesn't have to share details, but it wouldn't surprise me if the work Rythm they put on him was too much, despite him being one of the best premiere editors in the world.
Yeah. That is also an interesting one. For what it's worth, he did seem genuinely thankful towards Linus for taking care of him earlier on in his career, and if he knew something was up I would hope he would have just left instead of being part of the farewell video.
But he probably was getting fairly burnt out. But as always, we cannot know what anyone's motivations for anything are, so it's best we don't second guess people's public statements.
Never burn a bridge. He left for whatever reason he felt he needed or wanted to.
Luke wasn’t part of LTT at the time as far as I know.
Sure, but they were still in close, and I assume that if this is about Linus, then he has always been that way, so Luke would know about that side of him.
I dunno, I just don't know. Maybe I am being hopelessly naive. The world is a shittier place today.
Just speculating but it sounds a bit like they've drifted apart. According to Luke on the most recent WAN show, he and Linus haven't gamed in about half a year and apart from the WAN show they don't interact a lot. This could be the reason for they're lack of interaction?
Yeah, but I would hope that if Linus was directly responsible for Madison's treatment that Luke would do more than just drift apart. He seems more principled than that. But I don't know them at all, so it is entirely speculation.
I think we should be very careful not to point fingers without knowing the full story. These are very damaging accusations if aimed at the wrong person.
Unfortunately without names we don't know who was doing any of the harassing. Why do you say Luke wouldn't tolerate it?
No good reason, he just seems fairly level headed. I could be way wrong though. He has publically call Linus out on his bullshit before.
This could all just be copium speaking, I want it to be a solvable problem, but if it's Linus, I don't think that's really possible. People can change (See: Linus Torvald), but I just dunno if it's possible. And I don't know if Linus Torvald actually changed that much either.
I must say i wass always appalled how he snapped at employees in the "haha I'm kidding" tone. It always felt off to me.
Ok I will wait couple of days to see how it continues, but I will most likely unsubscibe from all their channels and stop watching them completely. Which will not be hard. For real reviews I watch Hardware Unboxed and Gamer Nexus. LTT was on my watch list for some funy/interesting video here and there. And even those I watched less and less.
I just saw this morning that LTT on YouTube are doing a live stream to "address the situation". They have their upper management trying to clean up the mess as best they can. It stinks of soulless corporate BS.
I believe they posted their last update video before Madison's Twitter posts.
Honestly they'd benefit from a bit of Soulless Corporate BS at this point. Soulless Corporate BS at least ensures that sexual abuse allegations are taken seriously and there isn't a culture of inappropriate behavior nor language at play
I'm not shocked that they're plagued by cultural issues that have reached their breaking point now. I remember watching some of the first Channel Super Fun videos and thinking "what if someone doesn't want to participate in this? It doesn't look like anyone has a choice" but assumed that it had to be fine
Iono about that one, chief. Soulless Corporate BS is nowhere near a guarantee of ethics. The appearance of structure and organization has only a small correlation to actual organization and structure. I've seen many versions of this. The skeletons in the closet are all the same no matter how brazen or hush-hush you are about them, the real question is are they there, how many, and why. Honestly, Soulless Corporate BS is smoke and mirrors, and a red flag to start off with in itself.
This is the mindset of the entrepreneur that worked this way for years and made it. The problem is that Linus got rich from this, but expect employees to have the same mindset. This is dogshit
But then makes his employees give a cut to LTT cause Linus made em famous. Pretty gross
Trial periods for new employees aren't anything unusual, even in unionized jobs (my previous job the trial period was 1200h, current job it's a year, that's how long it took before the union would really start fighting for you if something happened).
my lemmy client's running at 1 fps help
She really should have went to a lawyer. Besides the fact that she was sexually harassed, lied to, and other large issues, an employer cannot just willy nilly change your contract after you already agreed to one. Them changing the contract after moving to that country, losing her visa, and virtually being stranded there is exactly the same strategy that traffickers employ to exploit immigrants into virtual slavery.
Also, let's not forget the trauma and fear for someone in such a situation. That comes heavily into play.
Especially at a young age. I mean that in an "inexperienced young adult" kind of way not a "she's just a kid".
Yeah, expecting a victim to lawyer up is a big ask IMHO.
This is a terrible position to take. Just because one person could have done this doesn't mean everyone can.
A lot of lawyers would at least hear her out free of charge, and a likely equal amount would see what a slam dunk case it would be in her favor, if everything she alleges in her post is true. The verbal stuff would definitely be trickier to prove without other witnesses coming forward, but I find it highly unlikely that all the mistreatment she suffered was done strictly verbally and there would likely be a paper trail for evidence. In which case, a lawyer would happily take payment after the courts awarded her reparations.
Look, I know this isn't easy and I completely understand why she was terrified of coming forward. I don't blame her at all. But acting like she should just silently suffer after that kind of abuse is just silly. I'm simply saying that now that she HAS come forward, she should hit up a lawyer and see if statute of limitations are applicable and if not, then sue the ever living shit out of LMG.
Assuming what she should do is the root of the problem.
I know that I'm done watching LTT videos from here on out, but I did go back and look at the video about what it's like to work for Linus and honestly I don't know why I didn't see more of the red flags sooner.
Here if anyone else is interested
This is an awful treatment of an employee and I don't know how many more cases like this are still existing at this moment. Fuck LTT, best I can do is step away from them and their content but if there is anything else I can do to get back at them let me know.
The get revenue from clicks and views and merchandise.
So stop watching their content. It's the best thing you can do to get back at them.
Done
At least one more woman has received shit treatment from Linus, I believe this problem is endemic.
Unsubscribed from the LTT channel now. To be honest, I mainly followed it because I was amused this "tech influencer" borked his PC trying to install Pop_OS.
"Yes, do as I say"
Any video I saw of LTT just boiled down to "look at all this money I just spent, so much money guys and no practical use cases"
Their Linux series seemed a little one sided. It's not like Windows is a perfect replacement which runs without issues.
Oh yeah Linus just outright also lies to his audience about his experience:
At 2:04 he mentions that pacman? tries to install a dependency for "apt" and then quietly fails afterword and starts an infinite loop. This is the most absurd thing to mention because to my knowledge, nobody else was able to replicate this at all and theoretically this can't happen either because apt-get is not in your PATH on an Arch system.
He so benefits from his reputation and since general knowledge of POSIX and the current GNU/Linux software is virtually non-existent in his audience, he wasn't called out on it.
I watched LTT a lot until recently but that Linux challenge seemed like the first sign to me that they don't look at everything in good faith. "Why doesn't Manjaro tell me it doesn't have APT installed" It's another OS, he acted like it's something you can just jump into without doing research. I know that wasn't his belief but it was his action. Nobody in the Linux community will say it's as easy as Windows, even Linux Mint requires a good bit more know-how than the average "savvy" Windows user. Windows doesn't follow POSIX, Linux and its tools at least try to
They do tho. Often.
I've read so many times that you are supposed to install it for your grandma cause it's easy and doesn't cause trouble.
Cause grandma has someone to go to when things go wrong Not to say that's right anyway
Tech bros being sexist, gropey scumbags
I’m shocked
LTT is approaching Amazon levels of fucked up
Wow, that’s incredibly terrible, much worse than I could have imagined. I feel so bad for her, and so mad at the working environment at LTT. I started getting red flags when Linus kept bringing up his classic line “I feel like if my company unionized then I’ve failed” every other week on the WAN show. Unsubbed then because I thought he was being myopic in his little capitalist startup bubble, but no, turns out he’s just completely insufferable, and a union would have eventually led to a complete overhaul at LTT, if not lawsuits, something he would rather give up the CEO role to avoid.
Yeah that doesn't sound great at all. Must've been hard not to post all of this before, especially with people constantly asking. It seems like suddenly all kinds of issues at LTT boil over at once. They're going to need a change of direction and some well worded apologies in order to win back trust.
Personally I've started favouring boring big companies over cool flashy small companies to work for as well because of this kinda stuff. Having a very informal atmosphere definitely has it's plus sides when all goes well, but when you're in a (relatively) small company there's sometimes also a lack of professionalism all the way to the top. When you start running into problems you might very well run into the situation where nobody really takes your issues seriously, and because the company is small and everyone knows eachother well there's really noone to turn to. At least in big boring companies there seem to be protocols and a bit more distance between HR and the management.
Hindsight is 2020 and all, but I did always feel like something was a bit off with his demeanor (Linus). First I thought it was just his camera voice/personality, but now I'm thinking it's just him turned up (or down) a notch...
Wtf this is really fucked if true.. this week's wan show is gonna be interesting
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I’ve been watching fewer of their videos lately. The concerns from Tech Jesus had me sitting further on the fence but that thread got me to unsub. If even part of the thread is true, it’s unacceptable.
I'll watch it, but only as I believe LMG has a right to reply. Their response to these allegations will be critical.
If they are smart, they'll have a demonitised WAN show, where they acknowledge the issues and outline their path forward. If they can't do that, I'll unsub.
"Madison's allegations were heard, and this is what we have done, and what we will do in the future"
Fuck that, Linus is the problem and is turning out to be a way bigger problem than I could have imagined. I hope the talented people I enjoyed start their own things, but I'm not supporting anything LTT.
I can't imagine supporting someone that vile as long as they say 'sorry for mistreating my employees and ignoring sexual harassment, we'll do better'. Like come on, be better.
If Linus is the problem then I'm not gonna support him. But we don't know who the problem was, other than "upper management". You seem certain it is Linus, I am not so sure. For all I know it could be Yvonne. Jumping to conclusions about who did what is just as irresponsible as blindly following/trusting Linus.
Ultimately Linus is responsible as the head of the company, but if it wasn't his direct actions then I am not gonna hold it against him unless he runs from the problem.
To be clear, I am not doubting Madison's claims, I am just not reaching for the pitch forks either.
I do feel a bit icky about supporting the company where that kind of behaviour was allowed to flourish, and I hope (perhaps naively) that the individuals and behaviours are being appropriately addressed. Ultimately, it is up to LMG to prove to us that they have appropriately addressed them.
Edit: just read the bit about him chewing someone out publically in the office, definely not a good behaviour to be demonstrating. It's definitely a sign that something is not okay at the top.
Even if Yvonne or anyone else is solely responsible in upper management, so what? They fire that one person and everything is magically fine? What about that time where at least one person harassed an employee (and it sounds like it's multiple people doing it) and apparently literally everyone ignored it? This is a structural problem, sure there are ways harassers can get into positions of power but there should be no way for them to thrive in them. The instant she was harassed, in a sane company she should have been able to go to someone else in upper management and report that shit, the fact that nothing happened tells us nobody cared.
This on top of the overworking of employees means LMG is dead to me. There is nothing they can do to get out of this, they have been fucking around for years and now they're finding out.
No, I'm not saying that just firing the person makes it right. At best it's the start. I am saying that I want to see evidence of a cultural shift that ensures that what happened to Madison cannot happen again.
I 100% agree that its a structural problem, but that is a solvable problem if LMG really wants to fix it, it will cost money, time and likely require a lot of restructuring, but I don't believe it is impossible.
I'm not confident that will happen, I am just being open to the slim possibility of happening.
It has his name on it. It's his responsibility. A lot of people here are avoiding Occam's razor.
Absolutely, he is ultimately responsible for the environment that allowed it to happen. It doesn't mean he directly did the things being alleged. To me, Occam's could be applied as: The company has known internal communication issues, the lack of an appropriate response to Madison's treatment may stem from that. And I also apply Hanlons as: Linus' company is being incompetently managed (by his own admission), whichallowed Madison's abuse to occur.
I'm not trying to absolve Linus of responsibility, he is ultimately responsible. But as long as he is not the direct cause of the problem, this is salvageable. Hiring the new CEO and getting their house in order will hopefully prevent this ever happening again.
You're literally the only other person besides me in this thread who is waiting for a response before being outraged.
People and cancel culture is disgusting.
I get their point as well though, these are very serious allegations, and something is very wrong. I feel terrible for Madison, this never should have happened.
It's worth considering that for some of the people commenting, they may have direct personal experience with these kind of problems, and their response is rightfully coloured by that. I am fortunate that I have not directly been impacted by this kind of workplace abuse, so it's a lot less personal.
I intend to believe people who speak out about their experiences. Victims had it hard enough and should be heard and trusted. People with similar experiences or supporting the claims almost always follow anyway.
Then you're an idiot.
The most recent is the cancellation of super mega. Matt came out with screenshots showing that everything the "victims" said was a lie.
Remember Gus Johnson being cancelled? He didn't do any of the things Sabrina accused him of.
Remember Pro Jared being cancelled by his wife and the cheater Hollie? He came out with a video debunking everything showing he was innocent and his wife and Hollie weren't.
Maybe you should let both sides speak before "believing people who speak out about their experiences". You're the problem.
I have no idea what you're speaking about and I'm not particularly inclined to look after these examples. The first thing you did was to insult me. Do you expect somebody to talk to you after that, in any meaningful way anyway?
We live in a patriarchy, women are grossly underrepresented and sexism is still the norm. So, yes, I give women the benefit of the doubt, because the history of women being abused is nothing new and the amount of that happening even today is not tolerable.
What I never wrote was that you have to believe everything at face value and to take out the pitch fork to manslaughter the oppressors.
Of course both sides should be heard. That is the whole point. Then problem is that victims are at a disadvantage, so it is important to take them seriously and to hear them.
People denying, downplaying or discouraging is what the problem is. People in power abusing people with no power is what the problem is.
But yeah, tell me that I'm the problem. Go on and call me an Idiot. I don't care. You could've written that what I wrote was wrong and why. We could have had a meaningful discussion. You chose not to.
You say that both sides should be heard but are not doing so yourself.
Unless it's legally risky for her (I'm unfamiliar with Canadian law), I really hope she starts dropping names.
Some people really gotta be placed on the chopping block.
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Jesus. That’s me unsubscribing.
What’s this about the OnlyFans though? Why does LTT have OnlyFans?
Wow thats fucked. I'm so sorry for Madison because she was originally thrilled to be involved with LTT. They took advantage of her.
Linus will get through this unscathed but it's damning that downright predatory and toxic men still rule the tech industry.
Talk about psychological harassment. Holy shit.
Yeah LTT just lost me for sure. I'm never watching another one of their videos after this.
Sounds like some good ol' sexual harassment as well, disgraceful behavior.
I hope LMG burns to the ground over this, there is few things that makes me as indignant as employee exploitation.
Linus is just another tyrant boss, surprise
Everyone loved the OnlyFans account. Forcing someone to manage it who said they weren't comfortable is kind of insane.
I'm honestly surprised they kept it around after the april fools thing, I thought they deleted it.
Really shitty of LTT to force Madison to maintain it regardless, allowing her to be on the recieving end of unsolicited sexual material from fans (some aimed at her) that she didn't want to read or see. That's really disgusting actually.
The OnlyFans account was part of an April Fools joke. They really should've shut it down soon after that though...
I swear I tried. I got ten screenshots/links in and then killed myself. I'm posting from the grave. Long live Lemmy. Infinite Twitter screenshot support was my dying wish for the fedi-verse. Bless you.
What the fuck!!! This was absolutely enraging to know. Linus is a piece of shit. I can't even comment on one specific thing as worse in the whole thread. Everything is fucked up about how they treated her.
fuck linus media group and fuck that motherfucker pretending to be a nice and friendly guy. How you treat your people behind closed doors is your character not the fake YouTube shit.
You should see the WAN show because he sometimes let's his true nature out. Even more so recently with the backpack drama and innaccuracies in videos. But there is one tell that he made a while ago, a few years now so it will be hard to find now, but he did mention how he is against "friendly banter being chided". Stuff like that easily snowballs into sexual harassment being brushed off, but since the tech bro audience didn't understand what that means, Linus never considered it a bad thing.
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Oooof.
I shed a tear reading this thread.
Jfc. Talk about a hostile work environment. I hope the staff stops joking about unionizing and actually does it.
A union would probably solve a ton of their issues with crunch, churn, and PR.
It would cost LMG more, but it might be the cheapest way to save the company.
When a corporation has over 100 employees and millions of dollars to spend on purchasing a new facility, I stop caring about what their costs might be. They should unionize and fight to prevent this abuse from ever happening again
Well, time to go write several long winded emails to all of LTTs current/former/prospective sponsors about how to avoid them like the plague.
What a terrible ordeal for anyone to go through.
Ultimately, it just comes down to the fact that they've never respected her, not just as a woman, but as a human being, to be useful when convenient and ignored when not.
I choose to believe her, because it's something that is all too common in this world, but I don't think the world has to be this way.
Really am out of the loop, never heard of these people. If true, I hope everyone associated with this shit goes down.
This is some shit. I'm actually glad I didn't apply to do engineering work there now. I am realizing if this kind of stuff had happened to me I'd likely be fired because I would nip that shit in the bud immediately, if it happened to me or if I had seen it happening to someone else. It's not right.
I didn't finish reading all of it yet but holy shit. She did not deserve any of this
Would someone be kind enough to post as text? I find it difficult to follow the pictures.
Seems pretty clear that LMG is a Black Company.
(sidetrack – first episode of Zom 100 does pretty good showing the psychological manipulation of a black company)
Unsubscribed from all their channels the moment I heard of this. I don't think I'll be returning as a subscriber anytime soon, even if they address and fix this.
I believe Madison.
Remember. Don't pick a side until both people have spoken.
Pro Jared was cancelled and was innocent.
Gus Johnson was cancelled and was innocent.
Matt and Ryan from super mega were just cancelled and were mostly innocent.
Let's wait before we judge, ya?
People have so much to say, that a blog post would have made more sense. Instead, they use a system with rediculous restrictions on the message size. Either the restrictions don’t serve the users or the users are doing it wrong. When pretty much everyone is bumping into this issue, I’m inclined to think there’s something wrong with the system.
Twitter started with a 140 character limit as that was what SMS messages originally were limited to (and still are, but phones can send and combine them seamlessly), as that was the original way to access it. It has since been updated to 240 characters iirc, but the idea still is that it's a microblog where readers don't have to read novels worth from each of the people they follow, and for longer content you write it on your own blog and link to it. But in the age of social media, hardly anyone has one anymore and you end up with this.
On Mastodon, you can pick an instance with a higher limit. The one I’m on has a limit of something like five essays worth of characters. Vast majority of messages are around 100-500 characters, but occasional you see someone actually put that higher limit to good use. I think Twitter/X has a limit that doesn’t really match the current need people have. I do understand the historical background behind it, but I don’t think that’s a good reason to keep dragging this historical baggage around.
There is no good reason for it, but also it's Twitter, who isn't known for making the best business decisions.
I've always got bad vibes from LTT. He seemed like he always had a "bigger than you" attitude about everything. The things mentioned here exceeded my already existing opinions about him.
Oof LTT getting two black eyes in a week. Really starting to fail it seems. Perhaps Linus should take control and reevaluate their approach
Posting because I can't figure out how to save on this client yet and I want to read this thread. feel free to ignore or download as you wish.
So happy that I couldn't care less about LTT
Can't wait to watch Linus fumble over the explanation of this one. I'm sure it'll just be a lot of deflection and not-so-subtle victim blaming, but at this point he needs to squirm. Can't pawn it off on "the new CEO."
This is crazy. I'm glad she's not working there anymore.
Wow... That's pretty damning stuff. Hope she's doing better now, and shame on LTT/LMG.
Sounds like they have no real HR and force people to burn out. The sexist stuff is absolutely horrible.
I've been a fan for years and even went to LTX this year (I had a few issues with the expo but put it down to the companies inexperience doing expos), but I think I'll be unsubscribing now.
Except they have done it for 6 years now, I'd hope ltx is mostly rinse and repeat by now
Expos are notoriously hard especially when welcoming such diverse attendees.
With that said they should have gotten the hang of it by now. It also doesn't really look like they hire additionnal people
Nah, fuck LTT. I'll follow the people I like if they do their own thing, but Linus and some others can fuck off.
I always thought LTT was shit and never gave them traffic. Glad my spider senses are working. I’m so sorry for her.
This is honestly worse than I expected, but at the same time unfortunately I am somehow only a little bit surprised. What a horrible situation.
What's the GN video?
I’m assuming they are talking about the GamersNexus video that went over their concerns about ethics and quality of LTT content a few days ago. There was also a follow-up segment in a more recent video addressing Linus’ response to the first video.
Gamer's Nexus
I've read this all the way through now and this is just crazy to me. I honestly expected LTT to give too much work to their employees and have tight deadlines. I've thought that for years. However I'd never think that it was this bad. From verbal assault to sexual assault. It's just way worse than I thought
I haven't watched an LTT video in a year, the content just isn't as good.
This sucks. I really like how they handled their employee's transition, and my screwdriver kinda rocks.
Hopefully this results in changes.
It is difficult to discern whether this is malice or Linus just being too incompetent, emotionally directed, & aloof to actually run LMG. He should have thought much more carefully before scaling to where they are now.
Is anyone surprised? Pretty obvious on the way that guy acts he's someone to avoid at all costs if not just for being annoying.
Been out of the loop last few weeks but damn, all of a sudden LTT has been getting so much hate lately almost everywhere I look.
Hey Linus, hows's that moat holding up?
Holly shit! That was terrible. Would be really disappointed to LTT if this turn out to be true. Maybe I should start calling them Linus Touch Tips (the inappropriate one)
From the first day I got suggested the guy and blocked his channel I never liked the man. Seemed fake and off. Finding out he’s a total asshole clownboy makes sense.
I’m on team Suop
I don't know much about LTT, but companies where you have a preponderance of young white guys, this is invariably the culture. If you're a young white guy, work hard to be sure you're not part of the problem.
So the situation is getting even crazier now. Someone pointed out this particular part in Madison's thread:
Apparently this correlates with the Naomi Wu a.k.a "Sexy Cyborg" case. When visiting China in 2018, Linus was supposed to work on a project with her. He wanted to discuss her joining Floatplane as a content creator and offered meeting in a hotel one of them was staying at. A misunderstanding came upon, where he intended to meet her to talk in the lobby, and she thought he was talking about a hotel room, that is her sleeping with him to get the contract. She told her how uncomfortable he made her feel and the misunderstanding was immediately cleared.
In 2021 she yet again accused him of "back then just wanting a blowjob for the contract" and also of removing Yvonne from the cc thread to hide infidelity. Linus was furious and this is what Madison is referring to. Linus then proved his version of the story by releasing the correspondence that the misunderstanding was temporary and not only that, but also that Yvonne was on the e-mail chain all along and this was a lie as well.
Again, the hotel misunderstanding took place in 2018, was immediately resolved, but was falsely brought up again in 2021 and now, another 2 years later Madison seems to be ignoring the facts she must have been aware of, even if not at the moment the "berating" she refers to took place, but definitely learned Naomi's accusations were false at some point between 2021 and her releasing the Twitter statement last week. I would argue this does shine a new light on her accusations and perhaps we shouldn't have taken these at face value until the investigation (""""investigation"""") concludes and perhaps authorities get involved.
In other news, a four months-old Billet Labs' in-house benchmark surfaced, which confirmed Linus' original conclusion of the review. Again, this does not prove they did nothing wrong in the process, but perhaps his decision to not re-test the monoblock thing was not a mood after all, and actually an informed guess from someone who knows what they are doing.
I feel like an old lady following celebrity gossip but I now understand why they love the drama. Or bumfights rather
What strikes me as odd is that no other employee at LMG has come out with allegations of this kind of environment. With the number of staff they have right now and even more people who don't work there anymore, surely someone else would step forward if it was this bad? The crunch and overwork is confirmed of course, but the illegal stuff like sexual harassment and breach of contract seems like it would have multiple people blowing whistles if not filing lawsuits.
I think the issues and harassment she faced were very real, and are all very serious complaints.
But calling a job stressful where you had to make six social media posts a day and two fluff videos a week? I mean…
Not sure if it's been brought up here... But on their newest video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0cTpTMl8kFY) They don't address this at all. And if you try to bring it up in the comments, they get deleted/purged. Pretty shady to actively go out and censor this. Not a good look for LMG at all.
I've made purchases from their store... I get asked all the time about the screwdriver and backpack. Now I feel like shit for supporting them. Now the conversation will need to have a caveat everytime.. "It's a good product... but the company is a toxic ". And that's just sad.
I'm more inclined to trust this account than I am with others because there's a lot of things she mentioned which are quite synonymous with the 'tech bro' industry:
However, I will withhold my judgement until I hear both sides of the story like always. I also don't know why she didn't press criminal charges, I'm sure sexual assault is a crime in Canada and you won't have to pay legal fees like she mentioned towards the end. And one more thing, she should have mentioned these "managers", "certain members", and alleged sex offenders by name.
Given she was self-harming to get out of work she probably didn't have the frame of mind to pursue criminal charges, and just wanted to put it all behind her.
The unfortunate reality is that we will probably never hear the full story. I hope these are the actions of some other manager, who was dealt with, but we just won't ever know or find out.
This is why companies of all sizes need a seperate HR department, so these problems don't ever escalate as described. I hope LMG gets a HR department with teeth and they can grow and move past this, but it looks pretty grim. Maybe this can be the change that the new CEO can institute.
Why do you say it looks grim? LMG just responded to the quality complaints. This situation is a different beast to tame however.
I don't really care about the quality issues, it's not why I watch LTT vids anyway. They are entertainment first, factual second. When labs is live I'll worry about the quality.
But issues such as the ones described can really spoil their image, and I don't want to watch content associated with those kind of problems.
They did a proper corporate response after GN pointed out how dogshit their first one was which was basically deflection and excuses.
And this is a very different beast indeed especially if higher ups like Linus are involved. That comes with a whole host of legal issues.
I’ve been in the workforce for 30 years. I’ve never seen anything even close to this happen anywhere I have worked, I haven’t heard stories about it from my friends either.
But we aren’t tech bros.
The circumstantial evidence seems to suggest that the tech industry has a big problem with this kind of sexual assault and sexual harassment. Why? I have no idea.
But that industry needs to take account of this and hold themselves to a higher standard. Getting support for this is probably hard for lemmy users because many of them are probably tech bros themselves and possibly blind to this sort of thing happening in their workplaces too.
Def seems like the rumblings around tech culture and sexism has some teeth though
I have seen this kind of shit happen. The shock factor is another reason why it is so hard to talk about. All around people kept saying "I've worked in this field for N years and never saw shit like this". It happens, and it is fucking everywhere. Some of us don't encounter it, but it is there. There is a real law of silence around these systems.
Or you aren't someone that woman deem as safe to talk to about this.
Sexual harassment and sexual violence happen all over the world and in every industry. Just think about how many people react when they hear something like this and that will make it clear why the victims often don't talk to anyone (or only a few people they see as safe) about this.
Or I’m responsible for the women on my team and don’t tolerate a culture of anything less than professional
If you never saw something anywhere close to this and you've NEVER been told something like this by a friend the chances are pretty high that they just never told you.
Sure that depends on what exactly you mean by "anything close to this", but when you look up sexual harrasment statistics it's pretty much impossible.
Also there is the possibility that you read those situations very differently, as you said some people are blind to it so you should consider the possibility that you are blind to it yourself.
Chances are much better that I just don’t work in tech
Nerds with problematic ideas about women who suddenly get power over women. That’s it.
It might just be because I am so out of the loop of social media posts but that amount of posts seems easily attainable daily maybe 2 hours of time out of an 8 hour workday? Wondering if it's just me? I agree that it isnt the "fun" job even if it might seem to be.
What year was she working there?
Based on what I know about the LTT crew, it's hard to believe such misogyny runs so rampant :/
I can totally see it happening. Everyone there seems to be worked well beyond reasonable limits. Some people who would otherwise think before they speak don't really have time to pay attention to what they are doing outside of trying to get content and edits out the door.
I think there was favouritism and misogyny, and senior management were definitely treating this person poorly and singling them out for "causing drama".
Others in the company were too overworked probably to notice, stop and support this person as well. I feel terribly sorry for them, but I can't help but think that if they'd loosened up on the pace of getting content done, if they might have been able to address it better on the whole without subjecting the person through all that trouble.
I almost want to believe that it's some kind of coordinated attack to stop them from building the testing facilities, because big tech doesn't want independent data to be gathered.
Unfortunately, the truth is almost certainly way simpler, rich tech bros being rich tech bros.
when you hear hoofbeats, think horses not zebras
Unless you're in a zoo. Or in African savanna.
Comes out right after the ltt tech drama, what a coincidence.
In your opinion. Cute. She wrote exactly what made her do it. You obviously can't put yourself in her shoes and instead belittle her.
Imagine typing all this and thinking to yourself "yeah, this is a good comment worth throwing into the discussion."
Everyone should be leaving this the fuck alone, let the alleged victims, lawyers.and LTT sort it out.
The timing and mental health problems make this whole story incredibly suspect.
If someone self harmed to avoid work that tells us alot of their mental state and how they see the world and how they will recall events. I.E. how reasonable their perception of the world is.
I'm not saying they are wrong, but it is the framework reasonable people will have to use when investigating the incidents. At this point the Canadian equilivent of a labor board must look into it.
Self harm is an extreme thing to do, which tells us this is an extreme personality.
If you ever feel the need to self harm to avoid a situation at work, please seek immediate help, both through the labor board, and from family and friends. Use your nextwork to immediately exit the situation.
Good job, guys! You drove out another great creator! This is why you have no friends, no life.
Mind elaborating who the "great creator" is? I sincerely hope you don't mean LTT
This comment could really benefit from some clarification on who the "great creator" is.
How great of a creator can he really be if he overworks and harasses his employees?
I suggest you go watch some actually great creators, like gamersNexus, who consistently stands up for consumers and for his employees, like hardware unboxed, who isn't afraid of pushing back against the corporations that arguably allow him to have a platform, like jayztwocents, who visibly strives to make the best product he can and almost always delivers.
So anyone can post a wall of allegations with zero proof and the retards here all take it as fact. Even if it were all true, the way you people jump to conclusions demonstrates the kind of fan base required to keep a company like LTT profitable through all their sloppy content.
12 Hours ago, Linus thought he just pissed off some GPU fanatics. This morning he wakes up to see how his apology video is doing, only to learn he's pissed off all of SIMP Nation. Jeeeez.
She's clearly mental.