Ex-Linus Tech Tips employee alleges mistreatment and poor conditions: “no one gets a break” - Dexerto

L4sBot@lemmy.worldmod to Technology@lemmy.world – 610 points – Ex-Linus Tech Tips employee alleges mistreatment and poor conditions: “No one gets a break” - Dexerto
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Ex-Linus Tech Tips employee alleges mistreatment and poor conditions: “no one gets a break” - Dexerto::undefined

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I don't see how this surprises anyone. As soon as the handbook was leaked I just knew it was a shit place. Why? Cause I work at a shit place and they do the same shit. Shitty people rip shitty policies and implement them shittily. Linus doesn't care, he wants profit.

So much truth. Look at the guy. How is front facing persona is. You know it’s some egomaniac that’s just like fuck you I need more.

It’s funny because publicly, he’s been disapproving of her in photos, chat. Like the look he’s giving her here, urgh.

It honestly sounds like my last job. Unprofessionalism in all its finest with nothing but favouritism, big egos and zero agency or responsibility given. All with endless work in tow. Yup. Good times 🙂🔫

What handbook?

https://pdfhost.io/v/YuYw8GOm0_LMG_Policy_Handbook

No vacation days in the first 12 months. Then 2 weeks of vacation per year, three weeks after 5 years of consecutive employment.

Damn, I'm happy to live and work in Europe right now, assuming that these are comparable numbers across the North American job landscape.

"Linus Media Group believes that vacation is a necessary opportunity for people to relax, refresh and recharge." LMAO

The rules on sick leave look quite awful as well.

Some people have pointed out, that this seems to be a normal vacation policy within Canada. Still a shitty policy, but I wouldn't put the majority blame on LMG for this specific issue.

They’re entirely to blame for it at LMG.

I highly doubt Canada has a law against doing more than the bare legal minimum.

Why not blame Canada for their shitty laws? If you had a business, you might just be doing the same

Because Linus controls LMG, he can’t change the laws of Canada but he can offer more than he is.

And no I wouldn’t. If I owned a business, I wouldn’t because I’d have made it a worker run co-op. Not everyone is a greedy capitalist parasite.

There's a reason the absolutely majority of businesses isn't run like that, and it's not because all people suck.

Two reasons, actually.

  1. These people (who do not suck) often don't really have what it takes to run a successful business. It's a hard endeavor, especially in the beginning, and often if you don't do the bare minimum, you die.

  2. As you grow, having 10 clashing opinions is a paralyzing disaster for a company. Solution is to have a CEO/owner whatever, one voice to rule, but at that point, is it really that co-op you dream about?

This is the minimum is Canada, but 3-4 week is more common in many industries. So if they could give less, they probably would.

You're literally required to report bullying to management, but apparently the response is someone telling you to stop being such a bitch.

Some of this is very boilerplate handbook wording but I gotta say some of these benefits are very average at best, especially the time off situation. This is from the perspective of a US government worker, where I regularly see my friends get hired in the private sector and receive much better time off.

And at least in southern New England, there's some straight up illegal rules in here, notably discussion of wages. Around here you cannot be ordered by anyone not to disclose what you make.

The time off situation is literally just the bare minimum legal amount in Canada.

I think the policy is pretty weak for such a well-loved (up until this week) company. Guess that's the way the industry works: put up with mediocre pay and benefits because you're "doing what you love," or if I'm feeling really jaded I'd say something like "abusing the workers' passions for the industry."

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Linus is absolute tech cancer, this just adds on.

When I read her post I immediately thought that the working conditions she described were driven by social media/influence based/algorithm dependent careers’ shitty work-for-incentives model.

It’s YouTuber burnout, but spread around inside a small company to more people.

I'm just gonna say that, after around 25 people or so, you're no longer a small company. You've entered a solid intermediate realm. At 100+ employees. LMG is not a small company. Just average, most large companies have around 200 give or take 50 people. Very few international conglomerates surpass the thousands and several thousands of employees, and they're typically broken up hierarchically into 100 to 200 people units. So calling LMG a small company diminishes the extend of the potential harm they could incur. This is not a four people startup suffering from the woes of the YT algorithm. This is systematic and management enabled abuse.

Yea, I started to work at my current company at only 12 employees. Now we're more than 100 people employed and I can definitely see some growing pains. The biggest change for me is previously there's basically no intra office politics but with more product people being added they started scheming to get more advantage inside the company.

I strongly disagree.

I work for a company that employs around 50,000 people. My department alone is close to 100 people.

That sounds like a lot of people and I would consider this to be a pretty large company, but we don't even hold a candle to super giants like Amazon who employs a little more than 1.5million people.

They are most certainly still small, but well past the "mom and pop" small business stage.

I address this in my comment. Companies with more that 10 thousands of employees are a handful. And Amazon is one company. Multi million employees companies, like FAANG members, are in the single digits. They are an anomaly and hardly represent large companies. The vast majority of companies considered large, rarely break the thousand employees.

None of what this employee posted as a requirement, of their weekly job requirements seems like much of an ask to be quite frank

I replied this in another thread. Which was downvoted…

It really feels like the pitchforks are out. People want blood and don’t care if the allegations are true or not.

Probably mistakes were made, hopefully just innocent mistakes or bad communication. But it really feels like people don’t care. They see LTT doing well and want to tear them down, even if bringing LTT down will be bad for everyone.

I’ve had a disgruntled employee before. Their version of events was very different to how the rest of the team saw it. If something innocent could have been taken badly it was. I’m not saying that happened here. But let’s investigate and presume innocence.

When was the last time you accidentally told someone at work to calm their tits and twerk for you, and in what psychotic universe is that innocent

Okay, I wanna say that you're right. It's never an okay and cool thing to say to an employee that is working for you. However, let me give you some of my perspective, because I can easily see how stuff like this can happen by accident or "innocently".

I'm socially retarded, I might even have a tad bit of autism. Social ques for me are just hard and sometimes takes a while for me to figure out. It's like a science at times.

So I think "Calm your tits" is an expression used for basically "Calm down", "Don't get too excited" or "Take it easy". And I can easily see two close friends taking this expression a step further and adding "Calm your tits and twerk for me!" as a fun way to say "Don't get too exited but get exited"

Now I could easily see a younger me stumbling upon two dudes having this social interaction and hearing this new fun expression and wanting to try it out myself without thinking of how or to who I'm saying it to. So yeah, I could see shit like this happen by accident and without malicious intent.

I'm a grown up. I realize that the things I say and how I say it have consequences. The things I say to my friends might not always translate well into a work environment social setting.

So could this happen? Yes (at least I think so)
Should this happen? No.

If you're a businessowner you have (for lack of a better word) "power" over your employees and you can't go around using expressions like these in a professional setting.

Sorry for the long reply, I agree with you, just wanted to add some perspective! Have a good day! <3

Ok I had to walk away and come back to this because this is horrifying.

You don't "have a tad bit of autism." You're excusing your own bad behaviour because you're anti-social and lazy, and implying that autistic people are bigots.

You claim to be a grown up, and you think "calm your tits" is a "fun way" to express something. In a workplace. To a woman. There is literally no excuse for this.

You are part of the problem, and your reaction is to claim autism and make excuses.

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Bro that woman is getting death threats I kinda doubt she'd be lying just to be vindictive

Knowing what women go through silently and how much more they go though when they try to speak up... Yeah... Nobody would volunteer to be harassed by women-hating techbros unless they had a very compelling reason.

I can assure you, this is not about people wanting to take down the 15M subscriber titan. (though undoubtedly some haters are just jumping on the opportunity, I don't think that's the majority) For many of us fans, we have been seeing this coming for a while, or those who are blindsided feel utterly betrayed after such a long time watching LTT religiously. It's always been possible to ignore the awkward moments in videos or write off the bad behavior as just an "on-screen persona" thing. There's a clear problem with company culture at LTT, and these things usually come out in this way, with victims waiting for the right moment. Presuming innocence on his part means presuming lies on the part of the victims, and that doesn't sit right with me. I wouldn't necessarily take it 100% at face value truth but there's no doubt something majorly wrong going on in that office.

As a fan, I want to see transparency and a healthy working environment behind the videos. Linus' response wasn't just underwhelming, it was a complete betrayal. Even before I knew about the nasty working conditions, the simple back and forth between GN and Linus was enough to put a massive crack in the LTT facade. I didn't need someone to confirm the working conditions were bad, to make an educated guess at how the guy totally unwilling to spend "up to" $500 man-hours more on a video to ensure it's done right probably isn't running a fair system of work.

$500 to do a video right or $250k investment in Framework Laptops? Clearly you do the investment. Plebs are just plebs and Linus ain't no pleb now.

You lost me when you claimed that a low quality youtube channel going down would be somehow bad for me.

I think they made the correct call to hire a third-party to investigate this. A lot of things that are happening is LMG not treating themselves like a real company, rather a group of friends with a YouTube channel.

There's been a lot of incompetence and mistakes that happened because of the company's grindset, but they're not evil. They made some serious fuck-ups, and need to take major action to remedy them. I feel like a lot of people don't want to see these issues fixed, they just want to pull out the pitchforks.

Tech news is a saturated field. It's no great loss if this sack of dicks gets thrown in the river.

It’s always been a toxic field. Because those that do Tech News are those that aren’t the Tech Do’s and they’re salty as fuck about it.

That's why the only tech bro I've continuous enjoyed a guy that used to be a sidekick. IIRC his channel is Level1Techs. Just continously wholesome nerding out about stuff he loves. He's a network engineer by trade, started his youtube career as a sidekick to some charismatic dickbag know-nothing like Linus.

I think when a company like this egregiously breaches our trust, damages other entities, and then stubbornly doubles down on the same, it is not only understandable but entirely rational to be far less willing to give them the benefit of the doubt when new allegations arise.

But as always I, and hopefully everyone here, will update their point of view as new evidence arises.

"I got downvoted for my shitty opinion before, but I'm incapable of introspection, so I'm just going to keep saying my shitty opinions over and over again until someone tells me I'm right"

This is not really constructive information. You are being childish here. If you have something meaningful to add to the conversation just say it instead of being mocking.

Doesn't matter about the downvotes. These are the type of people who were frothing at the mouth back when Reddit detectives "found" the Boston bomber (they didn't actually and them jumping to conclusions made the situation worse)

The allegations are appalling, but that's all they are, allegations.

LMG definitely needs to come out with a statement about her claims but until then it might be worth reminding yourself that you don't know the full story.

I do think a healthy amount of scepticism is healthy here. Her accusations are worded very carefully to not directly target anyone in particular and there is no proof of her accusations nor any way for LMG to dispute her claims because of how they are worded. Regardless of the timing. It's all a little too convenient.

That said, scepticism doesn't mean blind faith in LMG, and it doesn't mean tearing down the accuser. The new CEO getting an independent investigation is the best thing possible and we should hold our judgement until the result of that investigation.

Edit: made my point regarding the timing more clear.

I'm glad to see lemmy so active, even if it is negatively against my comment

Not to even mention the timing. It's all a little too convenient.

The "timing" is "while everybody is discussing the issues within LTT". That's a completely reasonable time for an ex-employee to contribute their views.

If you're presenting "how conversations work" as suspicious, I don't think that skepticism is healthy at all.

Not to play semantics like the insanely bad take from Linus, but this isn't just a conversation, her accusations are serious.

I was clearly being unclear, the timing isn't important here. The me too movement showed that a lot of people who faced some of the same things she did stayed quiet for years.

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In that case, what would you consider to be a suitable “timing” then?

Is it just after a victim (children/teenagers/men/women/anyone) was verbally/physically assaulted? Within an hour? Within 24/48/72 hours? A week? A month? A year?

When is the appropriate inconvenient (in contrast to your “too convenient”) time for you?

Whether the victim feels safe or not, ready or not, supported or not, free of any retaliation or not, when is it too late for a victim to speak out or tell their story? Is 2 years already too much? How about 5 years, 10 years or 20 years?

I was being unclear about my opinion on the timing. I meant to say take the timing out of the equation all together.

But yes, as a relative of someone who has been assaulted and sexually assaulted, my opinion is speak out loudly and immediately when faced with this kind of stuff. Every minute you waste speaking out is another minute the assaulter roams free. I get that some may be uncomfortable with that, and they should speak out as soon as they are emotionally able to.

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How do we know the employee wasn't toxic?

Has any other employees come forward. I hate exploitive work places but I'm skeptical about these public mud flinging things now. Its like there's a script they all use when let go.

Nobody knows anything but the people directly involved.

However the allegations sound too much like what other women deal with in shitty, toxic techbro spaces, and it sounds too much like the kind of corporate culture that would put out bullshit "test" numbers, wave off conflicts of interest, and callously torpedo a startup to chase dollars and ego.

Other employees have, the employee handbook was leaked, and before GN did his video that started all this he also did a video where he interviewed LMG employees.

GN did not interview LMG employees.

I checked and can confirm, I can't see any interviews of LMG employees in the last few months and he explicitly states that he did not reach out to anyone from LMG for comment in his latest video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3byz3txpso

Yep, he uses the clip that LMG released about interviewing their employees on how it's like to work there.

Her experiences are similar to other workplaces I've been at. Even if she's toxic as you are suggesting, it sounds like there is an extremely rotten company culture.

Can't ask that stuff on here mate, this thread is for shitting on Linus and taking Madisons words at face value. I'm not about to lick LMG's asshole, but you'd think if this were an endemic culture issue that there would be several reports from previous employees (especially if the behavior is as abhorrent as she alleges)

but you'd think if this were an endemic culture issue that there would be several reports from previous employees

Someone has to be the first person to report something.

I'm looking at the OP getting 100 downvotes for asking a question, lol. :)

If it's one topic you can't say anything about here on Lemmy it's this one, appearently.

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That article was a pain to read with the they/them pronouns I'm all for equality for all but damn, grandmas has rules for a reason

Mate, its an indirect usage. Thats how it was used back before the pronoun nonsense began. Ease up.

It bothered me but only because they used it interchangeably with her. I don't think they were using it indirectly like another commenter suggested since they were talking about a specific person who was identified in other parts of the article as her. It's lazy writing and sounds bad to just randomly switch back and forth like that, and idk if this person actually goes by they or her but it's disrespectful to keep saying her if they actually go by they. Anyhow that's my 2 cents, it bothered me too but because they were being really lazy about the writing and/or rude depending on the actual circumstances.