After not publishing videos for over a week, this is the response from Linus and the team at LTT regarding recent quality issues. This is in response to several topics from early last week.
After not publishing videos for over a week, this is the response from Linus and the team at LTT regarding recent quality issues. This is in response to several topics from early last week.
I'm trying to word this as neutrally as I can. ---begin here They took a week to have an all-hands event to try to fix company culture and surface any problems. They've put in place some things:...
Exemplary
I'm trying to word this as neutrally as I can.
---begin here
They took a week to have an all-hands event to try to fix company culture and surface any problems. They've put in place some things:
They're reducing quantity of output to give a greater focus on quality
They used to have a mentality of "haven't missed an upload in 10+ years", and that's now gone. If a video does not meet content quality standards people are allowed to "stop the presses" to fix it. If it's already gone up there's a more transparent process about declaring errors, from on-screen messages, pinned comments, take-down and reshoots, or abandoning the video entirely.
Project management has changed, and they're focussing on in-person meetings to make sure project scope is controlled. In future people will understand the graphs they're creating. (!) This should improve accuracy.
publishing their full testing methodologies, and open sourcing testing frameworks
trying to get better processes for error checking, including pre and post edits, and these checks can stop the video being uploaded.
They've taken down or de-listed dozens of inaccurate videos and are in the process of fixing them
starting a community driven error checking community to fact-check a bit more independently than their internal checks
they're still going to do some quick and dirty testing, but they're going to be more clear that these are quick and dirty
they're holding weekly meetings to debrief
more transparency, to make some internal guidance public. Better more standard, management.
Revised item tracking process to "heart beat" mechanism. (Here he's saying that items sometimes start as "we don't need it back" and end up as "actually, we do need it back". It's about 7:55 into the video)
12 Workplace culture sounds like it's not so much new stuff? he lays out some of the additional packages etc.
13 some talk about HR team - and that there is an HR department available to employees and conflict resolution in place. this isn't new, it was all in place.
14 the workplace mental health counselling plan has increased because of the numbers of people getting bullied - he's clearly emotional here, and wanting to defend his staff. This is 11:10
15 talks about high workload, shows obscured cctv coverage of the parking lot. Defends it, but talks about reducing burdens of content creation in future. Also talks about staff turnover rates. Turnover may rise as they take action.
I sort of felt like the comment about workplace culture being good enough that turn over rate get so low was a way to indirectly counter the harrassement accusation. It's not a bulletproof...
I sort of felt like the comment about workplace culture being good enough that turn over rate get so low was a way to indirectly counter the harrassement accusation.
It's not a bulletproof argument, but I'd expect turnover to be higher than average if there was much sexual harrassement.
Their turnover actually is higher than average (quite a bit higher) if you compare within their own industry and not all turnover in all jobs in Canada, which is a pointless comparison. They made...
Their turnover actually is higher than average (quite a bit higher) if you compare within their own industry and not all turnover in all jobs in Canada, which is a pointless comparison. They made the pointless comparison bc it makes them look better and most won't realize that their own industry has a turnover rate that is less than half of LMG's. Additionally, LMG was a pretty small company and rapidly expanded in the past couple years, so most employees are too new for most of them to be leaving.
It's more than that. Reddit has been screaming about how the LMG workforce must unionize. They've been claiming that the employees are overworked and it's just crunch culture always. So this was...
It's more than that. Reddit has been screaming about how the LMG workforce must unionize. They've been claiming that the employees are overworked and it's just crunch culture always.
So this was more directed at people who throught LMG was a hellhole. Reddit did have some "proof" in the form of an employee interview view where multiple people complained about lack of time to finish videos. What Reddit failed to realize is that lack of time doesn't mean overtime, just a shortage of time in the given workday.
So hopefully Reddit and others will stop trying to put words in the employees mouths. As to the Madison situation, there's an external investigator that's been hired and the official word from the CEO is to not talk about it until the investigation is done. You can see the official CEO message in the linked video.
It's pretty much all focused on the quality of testing issues. There wasn't much of a chance they would address the sexual harassment issues, that is entering legal territory now and their lawyers...
It's pretty much all focused on the quality of testing issues. There wasn't much of a chance they would address the sexual harassment issues, that is entering legal territory now and their lawyers have almost certainly told them not to comment to avoid liabilities.
My interpretation is the part they said "due to being a media company our departures are loudest" was a direct response to that. I would say it's even textbook response for damage control. They...
My interpretation is the part they said "due to being a media company our departures are loudest" was a direct response to that. I would say it's even textbook response for damage control. They didn't bring the topic up directly so they can distance themselves and ignores big portions of allegations to put the blame on Internet fame.
Another opinionated take from me is that they were signaling about some layoffs. While I'm hopeful they are going to fire these people, it may also be about a potential downsizing. I guess it's something we will never know fully.
To be fair, considering that video sparked this recent scandal, delisting it would be equally problematic. If they had had it delisted I'm sure that people would start claiming that they were...
To be fair, considering that video sparked this recent scandal, delisting it would be equally problematic. If they had had it delisted I'm sure that people would start claiming that they were trying to hide it or cover up their mistakes.
They could always do something like prepend "[INACCURATE TESTS, SEE DESCRIPTION]" to the video title, with a full explanation of the issues with the video in the description. Alternatively, they...
They could always do something like prepend "[INACCURATE TESTS, SEE DESCRIPTION]" to the video title, with a full explanation of the issues with the video in the description. Alternatively, they could make a video explaining what went wrong, unlist the original video, and link to it from the mistake explanation video.
There are several ways for them to admit that the video was wrong while leaving it up.
It's possible they've been advised by council to leave it untouched until the matter with Billet is officially resolved so they avoid any accusations of evidence tampering. Still, doubtful any...
It's possible they've been advised by council to leave it untouched until the matter with Billet is officially resolved so they avoid any accusations of evidence tampering. Still, doubtful any potential customer will actually be misinformed by it at this point. It's an obviously bad preview of a prototype. Anyone actually interested in buying Billet will be and to see there's nothing for them there.
I didn't see a thread for this, but here's an interesting video by Ian Cutress, formerly of AnandTech. I think it's a good critique of both sides (LTT for their failures, GN for their...
I didn't see a thread for this, but here's an interesting video by Ian Cutress, formerly of AnandTech. I think it's a good critique of both sides (LTT for their failures, GN for their sensationlism/failing to follow proper journalistic etiquette).
After not publishing videos for over a week, this is the response from Linus and the team at LTT regarding recent quality issues. This is in response to several topics from early last week.
As someone who has no interest in watching their videos and has just been very loosely following the headlines, what's the plan?
I'm trying to word this as neutrally as I can.
---begin here
They took a week to have an all-hands event to try to fix company culture and surface any problems. They've put in place some things:
They're reducing quantity of output to give a greater focus on quality
They used to have a mentality of "haven't missed an upload in 10+ years", and that's now gone. If a video does not meet content quality standards people are allowed to "stop the presses" to fix it. If it's already gone up there's a more transparent process about declaring errors, from on-screen messages, pinned comments, take-down and reshoots, or abandoning the video entirely.
Project management has changed, and they're focussing on in-person meetings to make sure project scope is controlled. In future people will understand the graphs they're creating. (!) This should improve accuracy.
publishing their full testing methodologies, and open sourcing testing frameworks
trying to get better processes for error checking, including pre and post edits, and these checks can stop the video being uploaded.
They've taken down or de-listed dozens of inaccurate videos and are in the process of fixing them
starting a community driven error checking community to fact-check a bit more independently than their internal checks
they're still going to do some quick and dirty testing, but they're going to be more clear that these are quick and dirty
they're holding weekly meetings to debrief
more transparency, to make some internal guidance public. Better more standard, management.
Revised item tracking process to "heart beat" mechanism. (Here he's saying that items sometimes start as "we don't need it back" and end up as "actually, we do need it back". It's about 7:55 into the video)
12 Workplace culture sounds like it's not so much new stuff? he lays out some of the additional packages etc.
13 some talk about HR team - and that there is an HR department available to employees and conflict resolution in place. this isn't new, it was all in place.
14 the workplace mental health counselling plan has increased because of the numbers of people getting bullied - he's clearly emotional here, and wanting to defend his staff. This is 11:10
15 talks about high workload, shows obscured cctv coverage of the parking lot. Defends it, but talks about reducing burdens of content creation in future. Also talks about staff turnover rates. Turnover may rise as they take action.
video ends somewhat suddenly
Thank you for the write-up.
So apart from maybe vaguely in points 12 or 13, there's no mention of the sexual harassment at all?
There isn't. I saw an article that they hired an outside firm to conduct an investigation. I imagine that's why they aren't saying anything right now.
I sort of felt like the comment about workplace culture being good enough that turn over rate get so low was a way to indirectly counter the harrassement accusation.
It's not a bulletproof argument, but I'd expect turnover to be higher than average if there was much sexual harrassement.
Their turnover actually is higher than average (quite a bit higher) if you compare within their own industry and not all turnover in all jobs in Canada, which is a pointless comparison. They made the pointless comparison bc it makes them look better and most won't realize that their own industry has a turnover rate that is less than half of LMG's. Additionally, LMG was a pretty small company and rapidly expanded in the past couple years, so most employees are too new for most of them to be leaving.
What industry would you say they are in?
Also I'd love to see the data backing those claims
It's more than that. Reddit has been screaming about how the LMG workforce must unionize. They've been claiming that the employees are overworked and it's just crunch culture always.
So this was more directed at people who throught LMG was a hellhole. Reddit did have some "proof" in the form of an employee interview view where multiple people complained about lack of time to finish videos. What Reddit failed to realize is that lack of time doesn't mean overtime, just a shortage of time in the given workday.
So hopefully Reddit and others will stop trying to put words in the employees mouths. As to the Madison situation, there's an external investigator that's been hired and the official word from the CEO is to not talk about it until the investigation is done. You can see the official CEO message in the linked video.
It's pretty much all focused on the quality of testing issues. There wasn't much of a chance they would address the sexual harassment issues, that is entering legal territory now and their lawyers have almost certainly told them not to comment to avoid liabilities.
My interpretation is the part they said "due to being a media company our departures are loudest" was a direct response to that. I would say it's even textbook response for damage control. They didn't bring the topic up directly so they can distance themselves and ignores big portions of allegations to put the blame on Internet fame.
Another opinionated take from me is that they were signaling about some layoffs. While I'm hopeful they are going to fire these people, it may also be about a potential downsizing. I guess it's something we will never know fully.
Since that's more of a legal department case you will never hear that in a video.
To be fair, considering that video sparked this recent scandal, delisting it would be equally problematic. If they had had it delisted I'm sure that people would start claiming that they were trying to hide it or cover up their mistakes.
They could always do something like prepend "[INACCURATE TESTS, SEE DESCRIPTION]" to the video title, with a full explanation of the issues with the video in the description. Alternatively, they could make a video explaining what went wrong, unlist the original video, and link to it from the mistake explanation video.
There are several ways for them to admit that the video was wrong while leaving it up.
It's possible they've been advised by council to leave it untouched until the matter with Billet is officially resolved so they avoid any accusations of evidence tampering. Still, doubtful any potential customer will actually be misinformed by it at this point. It's an obviously bad preview of a prototype. Anyone actually interested in buying Billet will be and to see there's nothing for them there.
I didn't see a thread for this, but here's an interesting video by Ian Cutress, formerly of AnandTech. I think it's a good critique of both sides (LTT for their failures, GN for their sensationlism/failing to follow proper journalistic etiquette).