Ex-Linus Tech Tips employee alleges mistreatment and poor conditions
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At least in the past he wasn't pretending to be professional reviewer, and was just having fun with his goofball friends doing crazy experiments in his garage like heating your house with your PC, or daisy-chaining the maximum number pf PCI-E extenders for fun experiments, or water-cooling their Red cinema camera, and those were entertaining.
But now he doesn't even do content like that anymore and became just an influencer farming out low quality click bait content ("I'm reviewing the cheapest junk off AliExpress") from his media empire built on the sweat of exploiting gullible young people who look up to him and aspire to be like him, while pleading poverty and pretending to be an accurate source of information because he now owns a lab and testing equipment, but has no qualified staff on hand because qualified technical staff costs real money and doesn't like being exploited for peanuts just to get followers on their Instagram accounts.
I feel sorry for their staff and for the younger viewers who will grow up with such junk as their source for tech information.
He did give up his reigns as CEO. Now he needs to let go of the majority shareholder position and get his ADHD treated. If he does that, stays as CVO and the company stops with the ludicrous daily upload schedule, they may find themselves embracing normal.
No union, no equity, poorly paid, sweatshop with added sexual harassment. Made all the worse by how regularly he brags about how much money he has while saying he won't spend $100 to fix a review they totally fucked up. Oh and he wants you to come round to his huge new house to do chores on camera "for a video". Yuck.
What leverage does Luke have? He's a CEO only in title, not in experience or qualifications. He went from university, straight to being CTO, purely because he's Linus's high-school friend, without any prior experience in the tech industry engineering trenches.
From his WAN show talks, his knowledge about web technologies and SW development seem to be very superficial, limited to what he gathers from talking with the engineers, but no deeper understanding of it, which is weird considering he's the CTO of a video streaming company. Who would hire him to be CTO anywhere else?
He's just Linus's henchman at Floatplane, not an actual CTO. It's the deal of his life. Get paid big bucks to be an inflated middle manager, best friend of the CEO. He's not gonna find a better deal with equity anywhere else.
>saying he won't spend $100 to fix a review they totally fucked up. Oh and he wants you to come round to his huge new house to do chores on camera "for a video". Yuck.
Yeah, that's the fucked up part. Despite now having the lab equipment to do so, he refuses to do due diligence when testing, because that costs extra time and money pleading poverty over 100-500 USD, but has no restraint in flashing his McMansion with heated pool and Porsche Supercar, with plenty of labor on house claimed as tax-writeoffs ("you see tax-man, this heated pool is actually a cooling system for my server which I use for work, and the project is featured in several work videos for the company so it's tottaly a business expense").
> He went from university, straight to being CTO
The CTO of LMG role is pretty recent and not a "in name only" thing. Judging just on that alone, to be C-suite at a $100M company with 100s of employees and no options? Oof, not that common.
In terms of experience, he has been the COO of Floatplane, running a dev team and SASS, shipping product for what 6 years or so and that's a more real qualification than most. I've seen him comment sensibly on development. Sure I've seen him not know some things but not enough to ding him. I'm sure he is highly employable now precisely because he does have real world experience in the trenches of something very successful. He is a popular known face and has industry connections.
They were basically cofounders and I hope I wouldn't have to explain, here of all places, why it sucks for someone in a startup to take 100% of the equity themselves (Linus and his wife). That goes without saying right? I'm not saying 50:50 but 100:0 is not cool.
It's not common because he didn't earn that job. It's not like he submitted his resume to Linus and after several rounds of interviews with him and other candidates, Linus decided he's the most experienced and qualified to be CTO, and had to make him an insane offer or he'd go somewhere else.
He got the job because he wash his friend. Other people at Floatplane/LMG were responsible for the tech/business grunt work that makes the platform work. He's there to oversee things for Linus.
It was a once in a lifetime opportunity for Luke to be CTO/COO out of university without any prior experience. It's not like other tech companies were begging him to be their CTO with zero industry experience and could negociate a better deal with equity than what Linus offered him.
Now for voting control, maybe it makes a bit more sense, and perhaps LMG would do better to be structured as a partnership with multiple voting partners – a structure that works well for some types of small business. That's very different to tech company equity though.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_employee-owned_compa...
Hope that helps.
Also possibly considering the narcissists that use ADHD as a cover for their behavior.
Yes, they exist
You’re reading too much into it, looking for a reason to get upset
Every statement I made in my post is fact. None of it is an insult and none of it had anything to do with people with ADHD as a whole
Your comment can be interpreted as anyone with adhd has to get it fixed out in order not to be unhinged.
You may not agree but it can be interpreted as such.
A much better argument would be to say: We should strive to be fair, balanced and be aware of the potential possibility of bad faith instead of casting judgement in our interpretation of what people mean.
You're insulting Top Gear. Top Gear is at least funny.
Yes, and? Top Gear is auto entertainment show aimed at adults, not a church gathering for kids, so of course they'll insult people
These two back-to-back scandals show that LTT has an extreme culture and leadership problem, and that looks like a reflection of Linus' personality.
My big worry is that whether or not they fix it, a company like this is fueled by goodwill. They've lost that goodwill, they'll lose their revenue, and that means the company will shrink and the most vulnerable employees will get laid off in a city with an outright dystopian cost-of-living crisis.
The problem people is Linus.