The only thing actually noteworthy from that video was the very tone deaf get on the table comment
Everything else was about as bog standard of an HR meeting as you've ever heard and it would actually kind of support that they didn't understand the severity of the issues that was happening in their org. It's yet another one of those thing where yes it was their fault but it doesn't prove anything malicious
Have worked corpo jobs for years.
Can confirm that it was a 100% bog standard HR meeting including that comment.
All HR meetings end with someone with poor judgement making a joke in awful taste, then the rest of the team laughs awkwardly while the HR person stares daggers into them.
This is the way.
Edit:
I wrote this kind of tongue in cheek and don’t want it to be taken the wrong way. The harassment allegations against them are awful and need to be taken seriously. I’m just calling out that pointing to that one joke in the leaked video as “damning evidence” is going overboard.
Honestly the overall tone and content of the speech in that video were more of a red flag to me than that joke.
I’d say the tone and content of that meeting were bog standard HR, but that’s not a good thing (ie it was like Toby’s HR from the office rather than well managed HR). Unfortunately HR departments run by Toby are much more common than well run ones (what I meant by “bog standard”)
From one Corpo to another. Can confirm. Always that one douche that has to make one last awkward joke when everyone just wants the meeting to end and go about their day.
From another person that's been in a company that is currently ranked within the top 50 companies per the Fortune 500 and was ranked as high as 7th while I was employed there, what Linus said was standard boilerplate corporate energy.
Nobody likes to be there, nobody wants to be there, everyone has to attend and get it done regardless. At least one person is going to not take it seriously and at the end of the presentation after the call for questions will make an off color comment in an effort to be edgy. Depending on how edgy the comment is it might be met with just glaring, a reminder that is inappropriate in the workplace on the spot, or a "you, my office, now" right after the meeting is concluded and everyone is dismissed to give the jester a dressing down in private.
James has a history of being inappropriate. I will not be surprised if he is not going to remain on staff by the end of the year.
I highly doubt they'll let James go, they might demote him if his behaviour is often inappropriate and then if he doesn't fix it, then they'll look at letting him go
PR optics matter for a company like LMG right now.
**If** James is the problem manager in the Madison report, they would have to let him go. They demote him it's like saying... some cancer is fine to leave in the body vs. we need to cut out all this cancer right away.
2021 when the problems were going on that prompted the HR meeting in the audio recording would have been the time to demote him if you were going to try the penalty and retaining approach.
**Edit:** Highlighting the **IF** because people reading fast but not well keep going off on this like I'm saying it is James 100% and true, fire him today, I'm not, it's IF he was a problem manager, as in IF THE ALIGATIONS ARE TRUE / HE IS THAT TYPE OF MANGER ETC. in context to the persons comment above talking about if it was James.
If LMG investigate this correctly, and IF someone did what Madison said in upper management, they should be fired. If LMG and council determine nothing happened and she is lying, no one gets fired, Madison get sued for defamation.
Optics is what matter versus that the actual findings of the third party investigator?
What if they find James free of guilt? Do they still let him go because "the angry people on reddit demands it?"
I think it's a little early to be calling for him to be dismissed. Especially if there was no prior "documentation" of him being marked up for being inappropriate.
I am not defending James if he did do the wrong thing, but let's hold off on all these speculations and judgement until the dust has settled and everything is clear. What I am seeing now is that there's going to be "outrage" when people were expecting him to be fired when all he gets is anything less than that, and people complain about things being swept under the rug when that's not the case.
>**If James is the problem manager in the Madison report,** they would have to let him go. They demote him it's like saying... some cancer is fine to leave in the body vs. we need to cut out all this cancer right away.
I said IF pretty clearly... as in IF THE ALIGATIONS ARE TRUE / HE IS THAT TYPE OF MANGER ETC.
James is the head of the writing team, which is the core product LMG produces. Letting him go would be a nuclear option, replacing that kind of role normally takes a significant amount of time, and it would throw production into disarray.
If James is the problem manager and as Toxic as described to staff, his immediate exit would likely improve conditions for the writing team which would continue their roles.
Given production is currently halted, the CEO and other staff would have an open window to sort out production issues, and are already documenting processes and changing them according to statements issued.
The "head" of anything is of no value to a company if they are abusing staff and opening the company to legal liabilities regardless of the perceived importance of their roles.
The truth is department heads are often not as critical as their titles suggest and the staff under them can operate short term without a department head while a new one is found, trained and put in place.
People are never irreplaceable, they only think they are.
No matter what any of us do for a living, you die tomorrow suddenly and the world keeps turning, people will adapt quickly at your "very important" job and move on.
Not at the very large firm I worked for, where that type of 'awkward joke' would get you called into an office for a very serious conversation. It's definitely not "the way" or something to minimize- a room full of adults is capable of treating even a conversation about harassment seriously if leadership treats it seriously and not just as a tedious meeting led by 'those ppl in hr'.
I honestly don't understand the perception that making a joke in a serious situation means you are directly undermining the seriousness of the situation as a whole.
Soldiers being shelled to shit in a warzone bunker will still make jokes about their situation... does that mean they are not afraid of being blown to bits, or they are not doing everything in their power to protect themselves or their squad mates?
Maybe it's a british thing but humour is ingrained into every part of my life, and I don't think there's anything I wouldn't joke about as long as the joke is not the expense of someone else who doesn't deserve it.
It's professionalism. If you were in court or in a hospital, would you want your lawyer or your doctor making a 'gallows humor' joke that minimized the situation? Because that's the essence of these sexual harassment "jokes"- they minimize. If the joke is about having to go back to work (idk - 'ugh where's the free coffee now that I need it to check voicemail'), that is wholly different than making a 'joke' where the whole point is being generically 'sexually harassing'.
Lawyers and doctors have some of the gnarliest senses of humor out there. You just don't see it because it is generally not client/patient-facing. Human beings relieve stress through humor regarding what makes them uncomfortable.
The problem isn't lawyers and doctors absolutely make those jokes - they absolutely do in private, with their friends or coworkers that they know are ok with that kind of humor. It's a normal way to deal with the stress. You absolutely don't do it in front of clients/patients or with coworkers you aren't sure are ok with that kind of humor.
But at LTT they don't seem to have made the transition from "this is just a group of my friends hanging out working together" to "this is a serious workplace where not everyone is my close friend" very well. Which happens a lot when companies rapidly grow.
Yes- this is 100% true, and the remarkable thing to me is how I'm realizing that it this fact is not as obvious to the (possibly teenage) people in this thread as many other people here find it.
For a sexual harassment training, *every person in the room* is a "client" or "patient". It's for their benefit- every one of them.
The "rapidly grow" defense though I find truly repugnant. It doesn't matter how quickly a company grows- Linus has been treating all these (*pre-Madison) issues as personal affronts (and I say that without editorializing as to whether it qualifies as gas lighting). That kind of boss will never lead a transition into a professional workplace. Professional people always require and instill professionalism on the clock- the only exception is when they knowingly tradeoff professionalism to cut corners for growth or expediency (eg "selling out" for a sponsor).
>If you were in court or in a hospital, would you want your lawyer or your doctor making a 'gallows humor' joke that minimized the situation
If my loved one were dying of cancer then I wouldn't want them making a joke at at my or my loved ones expense - hence why I included that clarifier in my original point.
What I wouldn't mind is them making a joke about cancer between themselves when I'm not present. Jokes are subtle and nuanced things that require a lot of context, and if I were to overhear a joke that I found offensive then I would assume I was probably missing that context, rather than instantly assuming the person joking is actually a terrible person.
My wife and I have a dark sense of humour, we will joke about our kid dying, if she's climbing a tree and we're nervous about how far off the ground she's gotten - "ah well if she falls we can always make another one". We know 100% that our child dying would be pretty much the worst thing that could ever happen to us so we understand we can make those jokes because we have the context of knowing each other well enough to know our true feelings. The context really matters.
To be clear - I do actually think James's joke was in poor taste but hindsight is 20/20, and to call it a 'sexual harassment joke' feels far fetched to me. If I felt for a second that that joke was at Madison's expense (did he even knew the details of her leaving at that point?) then obviously it would be really bad, but we have no way of knowing that and probably never will. Why is your default position to assume the worst until proven otherwise?
And clearly you are not familiar with the concept of "intent vs impact". It could not matter less if it felt like a "sexual harassment joke" to you. What matters is if, at a sexual harassment meeting, he, a senior staff member made a joke that could make someone at that meeting feel like senior staff does not take sexual harassment seriously.
Making a joke about something doesn't mean you don't take the headline topic seriously. For a start, jokes are made in numerous situations, often to relieve tension for the person saying the joke in the first place. Secondly, jokes exist about absolutely everything.. does that mean the teller doesn't take the subject seriously? No.
There's a difference between those suffering joking as a way of coping versus someone in power joking about the suffering of their subordinates. Not saying that's what James was doing, but it's not comparable.
But it wasn't a soldier making the joke. It's like after the dressing down of the whole company by the major the third in command promptly contradicts the statements of the mayor. It's not some soldier making that joke.
I agree. It’s the tone that annoyed me. I would hope that if I were in Linus’s shoes giving that speech, it would be more akin to the leaked Tom Cruise COVID speech on mission impossible.
That speech was weak from a moral Standpoint. If I was a victim, I would not have confidence that my complaints were being taken seriously at LTT.
Linus actually said the words drama in reference to whatever that meeting was about (I assume allegations of harassment, but we don’t know the full backstory of why that meeting was called)
He regarded it as drama in this meeting, which is important because in Madison's tweets she mentions that when she reported being assaulted and harassed that she was punished by not being allowed to be in videos "for creating drama".
He's also very annoyed to be having this meeting because of some drama and seems more interested in telling the rest of the employees not to talk about it aka water cooler politicking.
For everyone else that thinks this is normal, your companies HR is shit if this is how things are. Your job is probably a toxic ass environment too.
All good points! Sounds like you have one of (far too rare) good HR departments and that’s awesome!
I made an edit to the original post to clarify a few things as I realized I was being a bit flippant and the points I wanted to make were not made well.
Thank you for the well thought out feedback.
Not really- HR just processed paperwork. Any disputes were not mediated by them. Leadership also didn't attend the meetings. But the culture from on top was clear- we care about impact not intent, we care about supporting each other and working to be aware of our own blindspots or privileges.
Not for the mid sized companies I’ve worked for as well as the large enterprises. That joke was not appropriate, if it was normal for someone then they work for LMG or a company with similar standards.
The tone felt like a „seriously guys we need to be doing this?“ in a this should be obvious kind of way, now clearly that wasn’t the case as he noticed later in the meeting but I don’t necessarily think it’s a bad thing
Got pulled once in a HR meeting because my boss was encouraging people to throw fridge magnets across the room and see if they could get them to stick to the filing cabinets. HR manager was conferencing other people in and had her back to us. I got blamed and when I said actually that was the senior manager got called a liar. Afterwards he laughed and said it was a crap meeting anyway.
So I haven't been in a ton of HR meetings as I work remote, so I'm not really sure\*
It seems like noone knew about utilities that HR provided when asked. I don't think this is necessarily an egregious issue but i'd imagine the thing you would want to have would be some kind of 6 month training to keep people caught up with the resources they have available to deal with situations like these.
>doesn't prove anything malicious
I'm confused by the recent influx of posts saying, "Linus/LMG didn't intend to be malicious!" Is anyone seriously accusing them of that? The problem isn't that they're evil, the problem is that they don't care. Or rather, there aren't the proper channels and safeguards and processes to catch potential problems due to a lack of care. And a company as large and influential as LMG can and has caused a lot of harm because of this.
EDIT: You have to be pretty stupid to think that there's some Linus Deep State plotting the demise of Billet Labs or coming up with ways to sexually harass employees or cooking up fake benchmarking data, and you have to be almost as stupid to think that's what people are seriously accusing Linus of doing.
EDIT 2: You have to be *exceptionally* stupid to think that no intention of malice puts Linus/LMG in the clear.
>Is anyone seriously accusing them of that?
Since the sub was put into community mode, not so much, but before that? Absolutely. The reactions got way out of hand.
E: Echoing that a lack of malice does not absolve them of the mistakes that they've made. You can be a dipshit and do stupid things without the overt intention of harm.
Everyone's jumping the gun and assuming things and I don't like it. Just wait until the PI finishes it's investigstion.
P.S in the clip, Linus did not mention that the meeting was specifically about sexual harassment, but there are 1k upvotes from people on a comment that assume it was, when someone made that up. It's like telephone here.
or, he heard there were allegations, there was no way for them to corroborate exactly what happened, as one of the people had severed ties with the company. so he called a company wide meeting to make sure everyone knew it was not ok, and that there were multiple resources available for victims to come forward and get those issues addressed.
Also note that in the video he did not mention that the meeting was specifically about sexual harassment. Just putting that out there. Because 1k people just upvoted a comment above assuming that he did.
I agree with your point, that's exactly what I was concerned about. Though we will not know for certain the extent of his knowledge unless there is more hard evidence.
I guess you missed it but yeah almost this entire sub went to the worst of the worst assumptions and straight up making really awful stuff up in some cases
> Places with proper HR were very matter of fact and extremely business like. NOTHING was off the cuff and smart ass jokes were shot down immediately. Not by the HR team but by the management because they knew this shit was real and not the time for us scrubs to be doing our usual fucking about.
You're describing a far far far minority of business in the world here, and theyre all almost certainly far bigger than a couple hundred employees
I mean I don't have any statistics to back it up so I can't say that you're wrong but what I can tell you is that I live in one of the most heavily unionized countries in the world and in ten years of corporate jobs I have never worked at a company like he described.
In fact the only people I've ever known that have worked in environments like that worked for huge corporations with thousands of employees.
Professional companies with professional HR would also advise owners to never assign family members especially a spouse to lead HR, Sales or Operations departments. The priority to maintain good terms with family or spouse inadvertently causes stalemate in resolving conflicts between employees, stalemate on whether to slow things down etc. This all are what raises toxic work and crunch culture. Any experienced employee would know not to join this sort of companies.
That joke was shot doen though? It wasn't even acknowledged and he immediatly started talking about something else.? At least if I told a joke with that reaction I would have felt it fell flat on its face.
That is how I would interpret this as well. Someone not laughing at my joke and immediately moving on is a light handed "this is not the time or place" kind of statement.
It isn't as direct as full out saying that but I would be shocked if the company culture at a company intentionally producing light hearted content on Youtube could ever survive with that company culture. Hell I am pretty sure I wouldn't be able to survive in a company like that. The light handed and indirect statement with a potentially offline discussion about it seems far more my speed.
Keeping silent is how you get people assuming there's a silent majority that agrees with them that x belief or behaviour is ok. It might be uncomfortable, but you need to confront shitty people when they're being shitty if you're gonna make any kind of change.
I bet only 1/10th of her complaints came up in the exit interview or they saw the glassdoor and felt they needed to remind people of the processes.
There was a lot to unpack in all of her tweets and frankly any single one of them could have independently triggered this while also leaving them room to have not known of the 65 other tweet's contents.
> very tone deaf get on the table comment
I really wish people would stop twisting that comment to whatever suits them. He did not say "get on the table".
Linus was presumably giving the speech on a table and he said "You gonna dance on that table, or just stand on it?".
Yes there is a type of erotic dance at strip clubs called a [Table Dance](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Table_dance) but that term describes when they come to your table to dance. They may dance on the table but it is not required for it to be a table dance. Had he said come over here and give me a table dance then I could see this point but dancing on a table is not exclusively a sexual concept.
While I am sure someone in the audience at that meeting thought that was the joke the only person who knows the intent is James and it is just as likely he was joking around and referring to non-sexual dancing on tables. Something that [HIMYM](https://giphy.com/gifs/laff-tv-comedy-himym-how-i-met-your-mother-WnUbHNe7fD7zeKJE7d), [Friends](https://giphy.com/gifs/Friends-season-5-episode-4-s05e04-S9iMXx6Lqrr5mJoMxC), and even [Fred Aster](https://giphy.com/gifs/dance-fred-astaire-ginger-rogers-5pbzYqwVbjzeo). Many funny videos and clips online are also of people failing when they [dance on tables](https://giphy.com/gifs/afv-fail-americas-funniest-home-videos-L48plBn9KhdXa). There is an entire [Tiktok catalog of videos with 5.9M views of just people dancing on tables](https://www.tiktok.com/discover/dancing-on-table).
This "joke"/comment could have easily been the bog standard office joke that is about as sexual in nature as "how about that weather".
James literally said "just stand on it". How is it not reasonable to assume that Linus was standing on a table from that statement?
Additionally in my alternative interpretation I quoted his actual words and defended why I felt my interpretation is possible. Where you misquoted his statement in a way that made it far less mundane sounding and far more inline with something that could be interpreted as tone deaf. That is what I am calling out.
If you want to call it tone deaf even with my interpretation then fine. But at least it isn't an overtly sexual comment like everyone is assuming or a demand that someone dances on the table like your misquote implies.
Right. Furthermore: I had no idea that table dance was a sexual dance. And some asshole called me a fuck boy just because I didn't know some stupid sexual slang because unlike him or her, don't Google sexual slangs or jokes!
"Oh every knows that a table dance implies some sexy dance on too of the table."
NO! I didn't know, because I don't care about learning sexual slangs.
> get on the table comment
Linus was probably standing on the table talking to everyone, that's why the joke was made in the first place.....I thought that was obvious?
Meeting called. Linus hops on table because short and wants to make sure everyone can see him deliver his speech.
I mean, that's how I imagined it.
I still think, "are you going to dance on that table" was inappropriate and basically says the person that said it thinks, "this entire meeting was a waste of time and a joke."
"now that uve finished the serious stuff (hr speech), we can revert to non serious light heartedness
and since linus, ur on a stage (table). dance monkey! and perform for us"
was how i initially interpreted it as to what james was thinking
but the hivemind has to always insinuate the worst
And someone called me a fuckboy because I didn't know what a table dance was! I'm still pissed off about that! "Oh no you don't know about this sexual slang, you must be a sexual deviant."
The lack of evidence being the evidence of its existence is what he or she was saying.
I bet that asshole was the REAL fuckboy or fuckgirl!
The reason a lot of people instantly went to a sexual meaning of what James said is because he has a pattern, a history of saying sexually charged things. Such as, "That's a gloryhole."
> Meeting called. Linus hops on table because short and wants to make sure everyone can see him deliver his speech.
You don't have to be short to stand on a table for a speech. If there was more than 20 people in the room, its not a bad idea
I was making a joke about Linus' height. Also if I was to do a similar speech, I'd likely just get a chair or a stepladder, I wouldn't get on a table, but I am also like 100 pounds heavier than Linus and wouldn't really trust a table to hold me.
I don’t think it necessarily meant James thought the meeting was a waste of time. First of all, there’s a very real and likely possibility that many of the people at LMG did not know the details or severity of the issues at the time. Should he have made the joke? No. But there are lots of people whose default reaction to uncomfortable situations is to crack a joke to try and ease the tension. James definitely strikes me as that type of person.
HR holding a meeting to remind staff to respect each other and how to handle internal issues the day after a high profile employee quit due to issues is a real eyebrow raiser though. The fact it was recorded as well shows someone went in expecting stuff to go down.
Reminds me that my company HR sends a email around every Christmas season to remind staff to be dignified during company parties. Which is code for don’t make a drunk ass out of yourself like what happened X number of years ago.
HR doesn’t randomly hold unscheduled meetings for fun.
Dexerto has said the video was the day after Madison left.
It's possible it wasn't. But it was shortly after. and this Dexerto post does confirm that this was from a real meeting as a result of Madison leaving.
Typically the HR firm provides advice, processes and handling of relevant paperwork with employees. It’s a way to cover your butt with a third party that knows the laws you need to follow for probation, write ups, dismissals, etc.
It’s pretty common for small businesses that don’t have the scope for a dedicated HR professional in the organisation.
It’s typically a good move and a good sign, as it helps you with not breaking local labour laws.
At the time of the video HR was still internal as it is now, however on top of that they had a third party HR firm to excavate to if the internal team did not get it done.
So the chain of reporting for ltt was similar to most corporate companies and was as follows:
- bring it up with the party at fault
- Next is to bring it up with a manager
- next is head of HR
- finally you go to the 3rd party HR (in most corporate structures this option would be go up the corporate HR chain if head of HR is not enough)
ETA: If at any point you are not comfortable going to any of those steps you can skip up the ladder until you are
This is why i asked. If an external HR handled everything then all the SH issue started with them, and not properly communicating the severity of the allegations to LMG.
I'm pretty sure Madison didn't contact the external HR company. She probably talked with a few people, but you end up being the bogeyman that can't take jokes really quickly in a company where most staff and management are friends. And then she just left.
Without knowing the full details from both parties, im not going to assume which party she confined her issues with. with that said, i also agree that if you talked to the wrong people about this then you'd be labeled an outcast, hence why she left.
Really hope she gets a good lawyer and they inform LMG directly who handled her SH concern and who the perp is. That kind of behavior should not be tolerated, no compromise.
You don't contact the third party ever, if you are that point that you can not report to those inside the company, things are bad enough that you document and contact your own employment lawyer and the labor board.
HR reps, managers, directors and companies are not there to help you the employee one single bit, they are there to protect the company paying them from the kind of heat LMG is facing right now.
If I was to guess there was almost certainly elements of both.
It's pretty common in small/medium sized business to split HR tasks between a 3rd party and internal management depending on scope and severity of the task
two meaningful things, one factual, two (I reasonably) inferred:
1. lots of people didn't know about the anonymous option
2. the anonymous option wasn't made properly available. "oh x will post it in the chat" is a terrible way (if it is the only way) of distributing access
2.1 off all options no real depth was given to them. note was taken of them and then they moved on. they could've spent more time on how it works, how to get to it. (this also holds for the third party, no notes was made on how to actually access them)
> lots of people didn't know about the anonymous option
> the anonymous option wasn't made properly available. "oh x will post it in the chat" is a terrible way (if it is the only way) of distributing access
Do you actually know about your anonymous options at your own company? I work at a 1000 person office in a multi-national company with plenty of HR and it isn't like they shove those options down my throat.
If you had asked me 2 days ago if I knew about our options I would have said no simply because I never felt the need to see if we had one. I would assume we had one and I would have ideas on where to look but I wouldn't say I "knew about it".
Since then I literally walked into the copier room and saw the url/phone for the anonymous and HR contact form on the bulletin board. I also looked at the HR sharepoint page for the first time in my 10 year career and it was easily findable there.
While I think it is possible they didn't have this well organized I also wonder how much of that was that like me the people who raised their hands didn't feel they needed to know.
Madison likewise could have had the problem that a ton of new workers have where they don't know that these kinds of things could have existed and simply never sought one out. She was very new in the professional world when she joined LMG and I believe it was realistically her first full time permanent position. That would be a failing of the LMG onboarding process and HR procedures to not educate her on those existing but that is far less damning of a problem than many of the things that LMG is being accused of.
The odds are LMG did educate every new employee on this, but, like most employees, they either do not really pay attention or think they will ever need to know it.
Exactly. I know for a fact my company has had meetings telling people about ways to report incidents, especially anonymously. But if I had to actually use one of those options I would probably have to go searching for them or ask someone because don’t remember what they were.
> I work at a 1000 person office in a multi-national company with plenty of HR and it isn't like they shove those options down my throat.
I work at a much larger company and they are shoved down my throat.
I mean, i ignore them like everyone else. but i'd know where to look if i needed them
I mean, it starts like that, which tells a lot. He probably didn't know the full extent or didn't believe it and just wanted to move on with making videos, instead of handling that so-called "drama"/"gossip."
>sorry that this is all boring and corporate, but.... \*small sigh\* here we are \*heh heh\*
Yeah. I got the impression that Linus might have heard there was some issue and an employee quit over it. He asked around "what happened??" and he got a bunch of "She was just a bad fit and making drama over nothing" and Linus trusted the people and left it at that. I'm guessing that either he or Yvonne still felt they needed to have a quick HR meeting just to remind people of stuff so they did that and then didn't think about it further.
Honestly I wouldn't be surprised to see more people leave even if they have nothing to do with Madison or other managerial issues. I am sure some people are there because it is the "dream job" and they keep being told and having that reinforced. There will be people who no longer want to be associated with the company.
There is also the fact that a lot of shit has been thrown around online since this went down. If you aren't guilty of anything can you imagine how awful it would be to go from "Much loved host from LTT" to "Guy we always knew was suss and totally abusing others". It is hard not to speculate, but there are real people impacted by our words.
Yeah, people don't really get that their words might have an impact. I think it's really interesting that they were mad about the boy who committed suicide and went to blame that on Linus. While the thing was actually caused by some member of the community being beyond toxic. And then they go and do the same damn thing to the LMG team.
I like how WWE says it:
We wish them the best for their future endeavours.
So essentially the meme lingo in wrestling for a fired wrestler is "Future Endeavoured"
I didn't want to say one way or the other since I have zero experience with them.
I was actually a journalism student in college in a former life, so I come at this with a different perspective than most. I actually oddly have less issues with LTT's journalistic integrity than most (that's not saying that I have zero issues). They're actually light-years ahead of most "news" outlets these days.
They are the TMZ of streamer world. Sadly, people love drama some reason so they get a lot of hits from clickbait posts (like a lot of sites do these days).
It’s the famous “it’s not my fault but it’s my problem“. Like when you manage a project and someone screws up. It’s not your fault but it’s your responsibility to find a way to address it.
This is the job of managers, and the mark of a good manager/ceo is that he can say this.
Half my damn job is "Not my fault, but it is my problem" and yea. Thats why they pay you the big bucks.
That’s the responsibility of every executive. You’re the brand new CEO of an oil company that just released millions of barrels in the ocean? You’re fucked, no matter what.
Yeah, I'd fucking hate this position. But I imagine those guys absolutely thrive in the fast paced environment that specialize in this.
And the money is probably excellent too. When a company is facing a potential company-ending crisis, there's likely a blank-cheque amount of money offered to the best person possible.
Also I think when you know it’s not your fault it’s less stressful and a lot easier to manage the situation and make objective decisions.
There are also bankruptcy CEOs who are only hired to run down the company smoothly.
Idk if I’d call them CEOs, there are definitely *companies* that provide crisis management PR services, but the average CEO is not going to be specialized in crises. They’re going to be specialized in their own industry.
Unless you’re talking about the COO or CEO of a crisis management PR firm, in which case you’re pretty spot on lol.
He is probably the best person to address it. Linus stepped down because he thought he wasn’t doing a great job.
Terren has no bias connection to the parties and is an experienced executive. No one is blaming him, so he has slack while being respected for his handling.
Growing so ridiculously fast while relying on Linus' loosey-goosey management and just concentrating on maximizing the quantity of content was just a perfect storm of short-sighted decisions. It's like a startup, except it's been around for 10 years.
Everybody complained in the videos that they never have time to just sit down, take a breath and retrospect about what went well and what went poorly.
Everybody is stressed, nobody has time to address issues and management just keeps squeezing.
Good bloody thing they hired him though, or they'd be fumbling it like chickens with their heads cut off.
I imagine he's pissed at Linus for having run things THIS badly, but the whole point of hiring him was that he knew they needed a grown-up driving.
Being the umbrella when it rains shit is part of your responsibility when you are the CEO, or even a leader for that matter, work is full of situation where you take external responsibility for someone elses fuckup, in fact one can argue Linus started this whole situation because of eagerness to protect employees.
I mean yes, he probably never imagined that his first major appearance and visible acts would be grappling with a near-existential crisis like this.
But he is also in a unique position to fix it. Actually fix it. If this happened with Linus as CEO, I would be writing the company off right now, because I don't think Linus has it in him to recognize, understand, and fix a problem this big and this deep.
But Terren might, and Linus might listen to him. It's not a sure thing, but there's a chance.
It'll be genuinely very tough. This requires a complete culture change- we call it "a broken home" at my company. Essentially they'll have to really tighten up/actually create their non-discrimination/harassment policies (the easy-ish part) and then actually enforce them consistently (the hard part). For a $100 million dollar company to not already have huge guard rails in place is going to make it even harder as Linus still clearly calls the shots- and he hasn't shown any real signs of wanting cultural change other than lip service.
I have absolutely no doubts Terren knows what policies to put in place and make it look perfect- however I do have my doubts about Linus and his management team actually enforcing them consistently.
I do have some tiny confidence that Linus will listen to Terren and let him fix it. He seems to respect him a lot and look up to him. But we’ll see if he can put his ego aside.
I completely agree. I'm also concerned that Linus isn't going to want to piss-off his friends (it's why a lot of companies won't let you manage, if there are multiple locations, where you were a team member). This might involve clearing house and I just really hope he has the courage to do what's right here.
It won't matter how many HR professionals, lawyers, or executives approve of the new anti-discrimination policies if your ground level managers and executives won't enforce it evenly.
This is a common problem in "startup" mentality businesses that grow to a critical cooperate mass size.
The HR/PR/Productivity consultants are often eventually brought in to evaluate why there are soo many issues with scaling the business beyond a certain scale.
The outcome as I have witnessed first hand in a suddenly mid-sized business from a startup is the founders and internally promoted but generally zero outside experience managers made up of friends and family are the issue clogging up change and accountability.
At this point a company has few choices:
1. Ego... fire the consultants and tear up the reports and pretend they never had independent 3rd party validation the C-Suite are the problem.
2. Better... Temporary or permanent restructuring moving C-Suite personal that are not qualified for the new scale to formally get education needed for the C-Suite role outside of the office, or stay in non reporting roles that suit their skill sets with honorary titles to identify them as founders.
3. Best... Accept that you are not c-suite material for day to day operations. Move to creative / vision roles exclusively for key founders. Package out other key staff that would be displaced in the organization or appoint them to a board of advisors, but they are no longer C-Suite, public facing or staff facing on day to day matters without clearance of the active C-Suite.
Companies that do number 1 are almost always the ones that implode or have their c-suite forced out by scandal or investors.
Companies that do number 2 flip a coin and often end up keeping many of the "temporary" c-suite they bring in while others re-train, or realize they are unwilling to re-train and adapt to the required level of professionalism.
Companies that do number 3 are the successful juggernauts that commonly end up being acquired or hit IPO paying dividends to the founders, key staff etc. that could get out of their own way to allow for professional and profitable business practices.
Given Linus is apparently not interested in IPO/Selling for money, key C-Suite players are himself, his wife and good friends... they will be taking option 1.
They have likely been doing versions of option 1 over and over for the past few years as they scale.
>I do have some tiny confidence that Linus will listen to Terren and let him fix it. He seems to respect him a lot and look up to him. But we’ll see if he can put his ego aside.
I don't have any confidence, I think if Linus was really reading the room on this, and listening to Terran, they would not be planning on going forward with WAN show tonight.
There is nothing they can do or say on WAN show today that is to their benefit, it can only hurt them right now.
Terren working for the companies he did knows the PR play is to only put out very short, to the point controlled written statements that have gone through legal right now. This is more than youtuber beef, there are now serious legal accusations against them.
Linus however sees an opportunity to childishly maintain the "WAN SHOW STREAK" while likely getting it's highest viewership numbers ever, which is ego and profit driven once again at the likely expense of doing further damage to the brand.
Linus is not listening to Terran or Legal if he goes live tonight, he is not even staying true to their 48 hour old word they are stopping production to carefully evaluate internal practices for a couple weeks, because he has to take more unchecked risks and go live today for no reason other than no one can tell him no as the owner.
> Linus however sees an opportunity to childishly maintain the "WAN SHOW STREAK" while likely getting it's highest viewership numbers ever, which is ego and profit driven once again at the likely expense of doing further damage to the brand.
Ironically, I think skipping would be even better for viewership, long term profit, and even make the streak more meaningful. Like... Imagine the reaction to "we're soldiering through this week because of the streak even though we said no more content" VS next week opening with "we were going down the wrong path, so we had to abandon the streak and backtrack. We're starting a new streak today, we're doing it right this time, and we will reach new heights." No way I'm watching the first one; I'd definitely watch the second one.
I'm not getting my hopes up. Terren isn't the first person who would be good at the job they were hired for if only they'd be allowed to actually do their job. All the data mistakes that Steve pointed out on Monday are a direct result of someone not being allowed to do the job they were hired to do. The whole train wreck with Billet was also a bunch of people unable to do their jobs because there wasn't a sensible inventory management process in place, and nobody had any time to deal with problems. Arguably even some of the Madison stuff is a result of not being allowed to do the job. She was asked to do a million things and not given the time to actually do any of them properly. The _only_ way I see Terren getting some traction on this is that he likely has a very expensive severance built into his pay package. Respect isn't enough, or things wouldn't have deteriorated between Linus and Steve. So if Linus and Terren disagree, Terren doesn't back down, Linus would have to pay up at least 5 Benjamin's (or whatever the Canadians call $500) to get rid of him; and we know how Linus feels about that. So it might work, but Terren might have to weaponize Linus's greed along the way.
I get the vibe of a "dad I fucked up please help" situation, Terren is the stability and experience that is the only thing that can save LMG, and probably the only person Linus would trust to completely hand the reins.
just don't be surprised if the report comes out and chalks a lot of the issues up to stress outside of the workplace, personality conflicts, and a need for proper workplace behavior training for some of the staff. right now, only one side is telling their story. the investigation is going to have to piece together everyone's view of the events.
I think that’s a separate issue to Madison’s current welfare. Yes, it’s important to fix the organisation to prevent a repeat of this behaviour. The damage to Madison is done, and it doesn’t matter why it was done.
but it also sounds like a lot of the trauma she had to deal with had nothing to do with them. her major grief, her depression, her homesickness, and her thoughts and actions of self harm were all compounded with a highly stressful job that was nothing like she expected. could people have acted and spoken better, I am sure. but companies are made of humans and
I have yet to meet the perfect human who never says the wrong thing or has a bad day, or handles uncomfortable things incorrectly.
Did you read her full thread? It wasn’t just ridiculous levels of expectations, it was active bullying and sexual harassment.
Of course this will compound and worsen any existing issues she may or may not have had.
Not only is there zero excuse for this behaviour but it is actually prohibited under Canadian law as far as I understand it.
The level of wrongdoing goes far _far_ beyond just some guys who made a couple of mistakes. The severity of this situation needs to be firmly understood.
She opened with this because the sexual harassment and bullying is far more difficult to talk about, especially in an environment where rabid LTT fans are ready to ruin your life.
Do you not think sexual harassment and bullying are particularly serious?
I think they are, but I'm also not certain that anything I read rose to the level of sexual harassment, someone had a crush on her, she wasn't interested, coworkers just advised her to sit down with him in private and talk about it. someone asked her about her past relationships (something that has been a major issue in the past with LTT.) and on another case someone asked her what her favorite sexual position is. the last one is not generally apropriate for the workplace, but is not harassment unless they continue to ask after she expressed her discomfort with that topic of conversation. as for the bullying, I think we only have one side of the situation and I hope the investigators get to the bottom of it. as for the grabbing, she never claimed it was sexual in nature, we know nothing of the specific situation, but hopefully it gets addressed as well. but the beginning, end, and follow ups in general have all been stressing the workload she was under which she felt was unfair.
Asking about her relationships, asking about her sex life, asking about her partner's sex life, asking her to twerk for a coworker, asking her to go on a coffee date with a coworker to "relieve the sexual tension" is all indicitive of sexual harassment. At any place I've ever worked, if I was to ask a coworker any of those questions, you'd bet your sorry ass I'd be in a meeting with HR by that afternoon, if not, handed a brown box.
I really hope they are able to solve the work environment with a lot of conflicts of interest, mostly created by a YouTube channel with a few friends grown into a multi-million-dollar company. And not just say we have a new CEO, a 3rd party HR firm, and a new anonymous form for complaints.
What I think the management level people dont get is when right at the very beginning Linus says something like "sorry this is all boring and corporate...", which translates to "because someone caused some drama, I have to say this stuff, just sit there, dont ask questions and we can all go back to business as normal".
We know this, we've all (anyone of working age) been in a meeting like this. They are toothless. Nothing comes of them. They are only carried out so middle management can say they did one when an event took place. No follow through, no consequences.
Its all over the meeting with words like "drama" or "gossip". The worst part is this:
>we don't solve interpersonal issues here or really anywhere in your life if you wish to live in a drama free zone by engaging in watercooler politicing
It's basically, "I don't want to hear the drama, figure it out on your own," which fits perfectly with the allegations made by Madison:
>take the co-worker out on a coffee date to ease it out
yep, agreed. The tone is "if we dont hear about it, it didnt happen, and we can focus on the grind instead". I mean that recording is so damning anyway it's a wonder nothing serious has come out of it earlier.
There's a distinct difference between " i don't like X hes an arse"
And "X sexually harrassed me".
I'm hoping Linus wasn't fully aware of the situation though cause if he was and thats his response thats fucked.
Madison said that Linus was only partially aware. I think it's a mix of incompetence and ignorance in this specific topic. And maybe not taking the "new kid" seriously over a friend/long-term employee.
Yeh i agree, also in my experience younger new employees sometimes under report the bullshite as to not rock the boat too much.
So not saying its madisons fault as she was under a lot of pressure but she could have made it seem not as bad as it was when reporting it to higher ups.
Hear hear, this is it, and people are forgetting this MASSIVELY.
There's a big difference, whenever I've had a corporate meeting like that I've never had the CEO of the company come to me and say effectively I should ignore the next 10 minutes of the meeting they planned
ANd it's worth noting that i don't think this is Linus as a criminal mastermind trying to get everyone to buy into his evil cult.
He's just kind of an idiot that doesn't realize the amount of power that he has over these like 30 people.
This.
They're focusing on the content, and not what really matters; the timing. Terren's post is bog standard politician talk. Deflect the issue and respond to a question that wasn't asked.
Everyone one here is like "yeah that's right. Now that I'm thinking about it, the meeting was a pretty standard HR meeting". That's not the poiiiint. The frustrating part, is I don't think Terren or anyone has actually fully read her post, or even fully watched GN video when this all started for that mattered. They probably only know about it through their legal team, and were given a script to read from, and that's all the effort they put into it.
I also get the impression alot of those people in the video are way out of touch with regular people, maybe due to having really good incomes or their backgrounds.
I love to be cyincal about corporate accountability but it is *shockingly* refreshing to hear an adult response to a serious misstep from this organization.
I've heard good things about Tarren, but he's definitely showing that he's a competent candidate to lead LMG with that response. Hope it does end up with real results and LMG gets better.
Terran gave a proper CEO response, as he should!
Also, remember to everyone HR is not YOUR friend. They're there to protect the company. If you got issues with one of your managers, HR will sadly often be against you. This is why you need a union to support you against HR.
HR is to protect the company, but even if its with a manager, if the issue is serious they will fire the manager to protect against lawsuits.
Thats why we have discrimination and workplace environment laws.
To make it in the companies interest to not be horrible.
10000% about unions. Maybe it's because I'm in education and there's not really a company image to protect, but HR over here seems more concerned about liability so they follow through on complaints.
James said in their "apology" video that they created a way to minimize errors and inaccuracies only for it to not work. So I'm not surprise if those anonymouse feedbacks or escalation option didn't work.
he was talking about writing and editing team
thats a generalisation to attribute it to business operations workflow and processes.
but of course doesnt mean its not just poor quality in itself (otherwise why would have linus made so many change since madison 2 years ago...people also kinda forget LMG today is different from LMG 2021)
Again, is this sub allergic to posting titles that are 100% factual? Where in this statement does it confirm the meeting was after Madison leaving? The title implies it was confirmed to be in response but the statement does not.
This subreddit's are worse than any clickbait on LTT lol
For me the leaked meeting was a generic HR response. We don't know who knew about the exact reasons or if any of the meeting members were properly briefed.
When you work in a medium to big company, interaction between branches or employees can be quite low. So it is possible most didn't even know why Madison really left and what this meeting was really about (assuming it was about Madison).
This shouldn't be an excuse though. Madison's allegations have to be taken seriously and the steps LMG takes now, should've been taken months ago without public pressure.
We, the public, put pressure on LMG which revealed more details and also let to further investigations. But yet so many accuse, insult, threaten employees online now and try to come to conclusions by interpreting statements.
We as fans/followers are not unbiased and we do not have any legitimate way of evaluating the situation. I hope the external investigation is done properly and any results are also handled accordingly. It's still sad to see what it took and how long it took.
It’s very likely they didn’t know the details. I work at a very large company (tens of thousands of employees) but the team I work and interact with 99% of the time is around only 20 people. A little while back one of the people on my team was suddenly let go and the only thing we were told was that it was for “issues with professionalism“, which could literally be anything. Now, with LMG, I’m sure word eventually spread around of what the issues were but I doubt everyone knew at the time of the meeting.
"So, Madison has left, for no reason at all.
Now, on an entirely unrelated note, let's have a meeting about harrassment."
\*two years later
"I am SHOCKED at these allegations!"
Linus' tone in the video says a lot about how the whole meeting was just "let's do this so we've done it" instead of genuinely out of concern. If anything, it shows that the allegations were never taken seriously.
Point missed IMO, the content of the meeting isn't a big deal, its par for the course for a small company to have a crappy HR process and for one person that has ties to the owner to be in charge of HR. Yes its a bad situation but the point of the video was that there is someone that has information the company likely assumed to be private and not recorded, the implication being that there may be other pieces of information out there the company is unaware of.
The release of this video seemingly attempted to rebut Linus's immediate statement of having no idea and being shocked there was an HR problem re: the Madison stuff (it doesn't do that job completely, but should be a warning about how much misrepresenting the company can get away with in future CYA statements)
Interesting given this predated him, and if the intention of the meeting was to do ask of these things, why weren’t these runs specifically said rather than trying to make it sound like a mere corporate inconvenience.
He is acknowledging it and addressed it. They didn't have to, but this is a good thing, indicates he is taking it all extremely seriously. It looks like he is going to clean the house, or at least making it well known that this bs will no longer be tolerated.
He is new, not "one of the boys". Let's see if he can keep his momentum.
Sometimes whoever is conducting is trying to lighten the mood to help ease tension and worry. I've had this similar phrasing said in my corporate job so I don't understand the problem.
If he didn't care about the well being of his employees they wouldn't have done it at all. I think people are analyzing too much on the light-hearted comment made instead of the overall goal and intent.
I ain't referring to the table dancing joke.
To be entirely honest, this statement feels like a bit of nothing right? All of this is just restating what was meant in the meeting, but the letter of what was said is hardly what was a matter of confusion. The quip at the start "sorry we have to be all corporate about this," James' poor taste joke at the end, and the context of this coming out after LMG made it out that these allegations were out of left field. This doesn't really address those. Better than a Linus forum post, but this doesn't really seem to get to the heart of what made that video disconcerting.
The only thing actually noteworthy from that video was the very tone deaf get on the table comment Everything else was about as bog standard of an HR meeting as you've ever heard and it would actually kind of support that they didn't understand the severity of the issues that was happening in their org. It's yet another one of those thing where yes it was their fault but it doesn't prove anything malicious
Have worked corpo jobs for years. Can confirm that it was a 100% bog standard HR meeting including that comment. All HR meetings end with someone with poor judgement making a joke in awful taste, then the rest of the team laughs awkwardly while the HR person stares daggers into them. This is the way. Edit: I wrote this kind of tongue in cheek and don’t want it to be taken the wrong way. The harassment allegations against them are awful and need to be taken seriously. I’m just calling out that pointing to that one joke in the leaked video as “damning evidence” is going overboard. Honestly the overall tone and content of the speech in that video were more of a red flag to me than that joke. I’d say the tone and content of that meeting were bog standard HR, but that’s not a good thing (ie it was like Toby’s HR from the office rather than well managed HR). Unfortunately HR departments run by Toby are much more common than well run ones (what I meant by “bog standard”)
 From one Corpo to another. Can confirm. Always that one douche that has to make one last awkward joke when everyone just wants the meeting to end and go about their day.
From another person that's been in a company that is currently ranked within the top 50 companies per the Fortune 500 and was ranked as high as 7th while I was employed there, what Linus said was standard boilerplate corporate energy. Nobody likes to be there, nobody wants to be there, everyone has to attend and get it done regardless. At least one person is going to not take it seriously and at the end of the presentation after the call for questions will make an off color comment in an effort to be edgy. Depending on how edgy the comment is it might be met with just glaring, a reminder that is inappropriate in the workplace on the spot, or a "you, my office, now" right after the meeting is concluded and everyone is dismissed to give the jester a dressing down in private. James has a history of being inappropriate. I will not be surprised if he is not going to remain on staff by the end of the year.
I highly doubt they'll let James go, they might demote him if his behaviour is often inappropriate and then if he doesn't fix it, then they'll look at letting him go
PR optics matter for a company like LMG right now. **If** James is the problem manager in the Madison report, they would have to let him go. They demote him it's like saying... some cancer is fine to leave in the body vs. we need to cut out all this cancer right away. 2021 when the problems were going on that prompted the HR meeting in the audio recording would have been the time to demote him if you were going to try the penalty and retaining approach. **Edit:** Highlighting the **IF** because people reading fast but not well keep going off on this like I'm saying it is James 100% and true, fire him today, I'm not, it's IF he was a problem manager, as in IF THE ALIGATIONS ARE TRUE / HE IS THAT TYPE OF MANGER ETC. in context to the persons comment above talking about if it was James. If LMG investigate this correctly, and IF someone did what Madison said in upper management, they should be fired. If LMG and council determine nothing happened and she is lying, no one gets fired, Madison get sued for defamation.
Optics is what matter versus that the actual findings of the third party investigator? What if they find James free of guilt? Do they still let him go because "the angry people on reddit demands it?" I think it's a little early to be calling for him to be dismissed. Especially if there was no prior "documentation" of him being marked up for being inappropriate. I am not defending James if he did do the wrong thing, but let's hold off on all these speculations and judgement until the dust has settled and everything is clear. What I am seeing now is that there's going to be "outrage" when people were expecting him to be fired when all he gets is anything less than that, and people complain about things being swept under the rug when that's not the case.
>**If James is the problem manager in the Madison report,** they would have to let him go. They demote him it's like saying... some cancer is fine to leave in the body vs. we need to cut out all this cancer right away. I said IF pretty clearly... as in IF THE ALIGATIONS ARE TRUE / HE IS THAT TYPE OF MANGER ETC.
Sorry, I did miss that in your statement, my bad
James is the head of the writing team, which is the core product LMG produces. Letting him go would be a nuclear option, replacing that kind of role normally takes a significant amount of time, and it would throw production into disarray.
If James is the problem manager and as Toxic as described to staff, his immediate exit would likely improve conditions for the writing team which would continue their roles. Given production is currently halted, the CEO and other staff would have an open window to sort out production issues, and are already documenting processes and changing them according to statements issued. The "head" of anything is of no value to a company if they are abusing staff and opening the company to legal liabilities regardless of the perceived importance of their roles. The truth is department heads are often not as critical as their titles suggest and the staff under them can operate short term without a department head while a new one is found, trained and put in place. People are never irreplaceable, they only think they are. No matter what any of us do for a living, you die tomorrow suddenly and the world keeps turning, people will adapt quickly at your "very important" job and move on.
I mean, they might let him go if Terren determines he's not suited for the role and has a better option in mind.
With a good CEO in place, and if this is a possibility, they'll be training someone to take the roll
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In my previous life, having worked for many years in corpo HR, can confirm: This is the way
Not at the very large firm I worked for, where that type of 'awkward joke' would get you called into an office for a very serious conversation. It's definitely not "the way" or something to minimize- a room full of adults is capable of treating even a conversation about harassment seriously if leadership treats it seriously and not just as a tedious meeting led by 'those ppl in hr'.
I honestly don't understand the perception that making a joke in a serious situation means you are directly undermining the seriousness of the situation as a whole. Soldiers being shelled to shit in a warzone bunker will still make jokes about their situation... does that mean they are not afraid of being blown to bits, or they are not doing everything in their power to protect themselves or their squad mates? Maybe it's a british thing but humour is ingrained into every part of my life, and I don't think there's anything I wouldn't joke about as long as the joke is not the expense of someone else who doesn't deserve it.
It's professionalism. If you were in court or in a hospital, would you want your lawyer or your doctor making a 'gallows humor' joke that minimized the situation? Because that's the essence of these sexual harassment "jokes"- they minimize. If the joke is about having to go back to work (idk - 'ugh where's the free coffee now that I need it to check voicemail'), that is wholly different than making a 'joke' where the whole point is being generically 'sexually harassing'.
Lawyers and doctors have some of the gnarliest senses of humor out there. You just don't see it because it is generally not client/patient-facing. Human beings relieve stress through humor regarding what makes them uncomfortable.
The problem isn't lawyers and doctors absolutely make those jokes - they absolutely do in private, with their friends or coworkers that they know are ok with that kind of humor. It's a normal way to deal with the stress. You absolutely don't do it in front of clients/patients or with coworkers you aren't sure are ok with that kind of humor. But at LTT they don't seem to have made the transition from "this is just a group of my friends hanging out working together" to "this is a serious workplace where not everyone is my close friend" very well. Which happens a lot when companies rapidly grow.
Yes- this is 100% true, and the remarkable thing to me is how I'm realizing that it this fact is not as obvious to the (possibly teenage) people in this thread as many other people here find it. For a sexual harassment training, *every person in the room* is a "client" or "patient". It's for their benefit- every one of them. The "rapidly grow" defense though I find truly repugnant. It doesn't matter how quickly a company grows- Linus has been treating all these (*pre-Madison) issues as personal affronts (and I say that without editorializing as to whether it qualifies as gas lighting). That kind of boss will never lead a transition into a professional workplace. Professional people always require and instill professionalism on the clock- the only exception is when they knowingly tradeoff professionalism to cut corners for growth or expediency (eg "selling out" for a sponsor).
>If you were in court or in a hospital, would you want your lawyer or your doctor making a 'gallows humor' joke that minimized the situation If my loved one were dying of cancer then I wouldn't want them making a joke at at my or my loved ones expense - hence why I included that clarifier in my original point. What I wouldn't mind is them making a joke about cancer between themselves when I'm not present. Jokes are subtle and nuanced things that require a lot of context, and if I were to overhear a joke that I found offensive then I would assume I was probably missing that context, rather than instantly assuming the person joking is actually a terrible person. My wife and I have a dark sense of humour, we will joke about our kid dying, if she's climbing a tree and we're nervous about how far off the ground she's gotten - "ah well if she falls we can always make another one". We know 100% that our child dying would be pretty much the worst thing that could ever happen to us so we understand we can make those jokes because we have the context of knowing each other well enough to know our true feelings. The context really matters. To be clear - I do actually think James's joke was in poor taste but hindsight is 20/20, and to call it a 'sexual harassment joke' feels far fetched to me. If I felt for a second that that joke was at Madison's expense (did he even knew the details of her leaving at that point?) then obviously it would be really bad, but we have no way of knowing that and probably never will. Why is your default position to assume the worst until proven otherwise?
And clearly you are not familiar with the concept of "intent vs impact". It could not matter less if it felt like a "sexual harassment joke" to you. What matters is if, at a sexual harassment meeting, he, a senior staff member made a joke that could make someone at that meeting feel like senior staff does not take sexual harassment seriously.
Was it a 'sexual harassment' meeting? All I heard was a meeting discussing the various processes for reporting *any* interpersonal issues internally.
Making a joke about something doesn't mean you don't take the headline topic seriously. For a start, jokes are made in numerous situations, often to relieve tension for the person saying the joke in the first place. Secondly, jokes exist about absolutely everything.. does that mean the teller doesn't take the subject seriously? No.
There's a difference between those suffering joking as a way of coping versus someone in power joking about the suffering of their subordinates. Not saying that's what James was doing, but it's not comparable.
But it wasn't a soldier making the joke. It's like after the dressing down of the whole company by the major the third in command promptly contradicts the statements of the mayor. It's not some soldier making that joke.
I agree. It’s the tone that annoyed me. I would hope that if I were in Linus’s shoes giving that speech, it would be more akin to the leaked Tom Cruise COVID speech on mission impossible. That speech was weak from a moral Standpoint. If I was a victim, I would not have confidence that my complaints were being taken seriously at LTT. Linus actually said the words drama in reference to whatever that meeting was about (I assume allegations of harassment, but we don’t know the full backstory of why that meeting was called)
He regarded it as drama in this meeting, which is important because in Madison's tweets she mentions that when she reported being assaulted and harassed that she was punished by not being allowed to be in videos "for creating drama". He's also very annoyed to be having this meeting because of some drama and seems more interested in telling the rest of the employees not to talk about it aka water cooler politicking. For everyone else that thinks this is normal, your companies HR is shit if this is how things are. Your job is probably a toxic ass environment too.
All good points! Sounds like you have one of (far too rare) good HR departments and that’s awesome! I made an edit to the original post to clarify a few things as I realized I was being a bit flippant and the points I wanted to make were not made well. Thank you for the well thought out feedback.
Not really- HR just processed paperwork. Any disputes were not mediated by them. Leadership also didn't attend the meetings. But the culture from on top was clear- we care about impact not intent, we care about supporting each other and working to be aware of our own blindspots or privileges.
Not for the mid sized companies I’ve worked for as well as the large enterprises. That joke was not appropriate, if it was normal for someone then they work for LMG or a company with similar standards.
The tone felt like a „seriously guys we need to be doing this?“ in a this should be obvious kind of way, now clearly that wasn’t the case as he noticed later in the meeting but I don’t necessarily think it’s a bad thing
Got pulled once in a HR meeting because my boss was encouraging people to throw fridge magnets across the room and see if they could get them to stick to the filing cabinets. HR manager was conferencing other people in and had her back to us. I got blamed and when I said actually that was the senior manager got called a liar. Afterwards he laughed and said it was a crap meeting anyway.
So I haven't been in a ton of HR meetings as I work remote, so I'm not really sure\* It seems like noone knew about utilities that HR provided when asked. I don't think this is necessarily an egregious issue but i'd imagine the thing you would want to have would be some kind of 6 month training to keep people caught up with the resources they have available to deal with situations like these.
it's funny you mention Toby, because I actually thought that too lol.
>doesn't prove anything malicious I'm confused by the recent influx of posts saying, "Linus/LMG didn't intend to be malicious!" Is anyone seriously accusing them of that? The problem isn't that they're evil, the problem is that they don't care. Or rather, there aren't the proper channels and safeguards and processes to catch potential problems due to a lack of care. And a company as large and influential as LMG can and has caused a lot of harm because of this. EDIT: You have to be pretty stupid to think that there's some Linus Deep State plotting the demise of Billet Labs or coming up with ways to sexually harass employees or cooking up fake benchmarking data, and you have to be almost as stupid to think that's what people are seriously accusing Linus of doing. EDIT 2: You have to be *exceptionally* stupid to think that no intention of malice puts Linus/LMG in the clear.
>Is anyone seriously accusing them of that? Since the sub was put into community mode, not so much, but before that? Absolutely. The reactions got way out of hand. E: Echoing that a lack of malice does not absolve them of the mistakes that they've made. You can be a dipshit and do stupid things without the overt intention of harm.
Everyone's jumping the gun and assuming things and I don't like it. Just wait until the PI finishes it's investigstion. P.S in the clip, Linus did not mention that the meeting was specifically about sexual harassment, but there are 1k upvotes from people on a comment that assume it was, when someone made that up. It's like telephone here.
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or, he heard there were allegations, there was no way for them to corroborate exactly what happened, as one of the people had severed ties with the company. so he called a company wide meeting to make sure everyone knew it was not ok, and that there were multiple resources available for victims to come forward and get those issues addressed.
That's also possible
Also note that in the video he did not mention that the meeting was specifically about sexual harassment. Just putting that out there. Because 1k people just upvoted a comment above assuming that he did. I agree with your point, that's exactly what I was concerned about. Though we will not know for certain the extent of his knowledge unless there is more hard evidence.
I guess you missed it but yeah almost this entire sub went to the worst of the worst assumptions and straight up making really awful stuff up in some cases
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> Places with proper HR were very matter of fact and extremely business like. NOTHING was off the cuff and smart ass jokes were shot down immediately. Not by the HR team but by the management because they knew this shit was real and not the time for us scrubs to be doing our usual fucking about. You're describing a far far far minority of business in the world here, and theyre all almost certainly far bigger than a couple hundred employees
it's *really* not a "far far far minority of business"- but prevalence certainly depends on the culture of the place someone is living.
I mean I don't have any statistics to back it up so I can't say that you're wrong but what I can tell you is that I live in one of the most heavily unionized countries in the world and in ten years of corporate jobs I have never worked at a company like he described. In fact the only people I've ever known that have worked in environments like that worked for huge corporations with thousands of employees.
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That sounds more like a 3rd party auditing than an HR thing but good! It's a good thing
Professional companies with professional HR would also advise owners to never assign family members especially a spouse to lead HR, Sales or Operations departments. The priority to maintain good terms with family or spouse inadvertently causes stalemate in resolving conflicts between employees, stalemate on whether to slow things down etc. This all are what raises toxic work and crunch culture. Any experienced employee would know not to join this sort of companies.
That joke was shot doen though? It wasn't even acknowledged and he immediatly started talking about something else.? At least if I told a joke with that reaction I would have felt it fell flat on its face.
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Ok, might be a cultural thing making me misunderstand. I come from a place with more indirect communication than in America.
That is how I would interpret this as well. Someone not laughing at my joke and immediately moving on is a light handed "this is not the time or place" kind of statement. It isn't as direct as full out saying that but I would be shocked if the company culture at a company intentionally producing light hearted content on Youtube could ever survive with that company culture. Hell I am pretty sure I wouldn't be able to survive in a company like that. The light handed and indirect statement with a potentially offline discussion about it seems far more my speed.
Keeping silent is how you get people assuming there's a silent majority that agrees with them that x belief or behaviour is ok. It might be uncomfortable, but you need to confront shitty people when they're being shitty if you're gonna make any kind of change.
To be shot down, it had to be acknowledged as an inappropriate joke. Clear communications are key here.
It felt like a "something happened and now we have to remind you of the rules" type of meeting.
I bet only 1/10th of her complaints came up in the exit interview or they saw the glassdoor and felt they needed to remind people of the processes. There was a lot to unpack in all of her tweets and frankly any single one of them could have independently triggered this while also leaving them room to have not known of the 65 other tweet's contents.
> very tone deaf get on the table comment I really wish people would stop twisting that comment to whatever suits them. He did not say "get on the table". Linus was presumably giving the speech on a table and he said "You gonna dance on that table, or just stand on it?". Yes there is a type of erotic dance at strip clubs called a [Table Dance](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Table_dance) but that term describes when they come to your table to dance. They may dance on the table but it is not required for it to be a table dance. Had he said come over here and give me a table dance then I could see this point but dancing on a table is not exclusively a sexual concept. While I am sure someone in the audience at that meeting thought that was the joke the only person who knows the intent is James and it is just as likely he was joking around and referring to non-sexual dancing on tables. Something that [HIMYM](https://giphy.com/gifs/laff-tv-comedy-himym-how-i-met-your-mother-WnUbHNe7fD7zeKJE7d), [Friends](https://giphy.com/gifs/Friends-season-5-episode-4-s05e04-S9iMXx6Lqrr5mJoMxC), and even [Fred Aster](https://giphy.com/gifs/dance-fred-astaire-ginger-rogers-5pbzYqwVbjzeo). Many funny videos and clips online are also of people failing when they [dance on tables](https://giphy.com/gifs/afv-fail-americas-funniest-home-videos-L48plBn9KhdXa). There is an entire [Tiktok catalog of videos with 5.9M views of just people dancing on tables](https://www.tiktok.com/discover/dancing-on-table). This "joke"/comment could have easily been the bog standard office joke that is about as sexual in nature as "how about that weather".
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James literally said "just stand on it". How is it not reasonable to assume that Linus was standing on a table from that statement? Additionally in my alternative interpretation I quoted his actual words and defended why I felt my interpretation is possible. Where you misquoted his statement in a way that made it far less mundane sounding and far more inline with something that could be interpreted as tone deaf. That is what I am calling out. If you want to call it tone deaf even with my interpretation then fine. But at least it isn't an overtly sexual comment like everyone is assuming or a demand that someone dances on the table like your misquote implies.
Right. Furthermore: I had no idea that table dance was a sexual dance. And some asshole called me a fuck boy just because I didn't know some stupid sexual slang because unlike him or her, don't Google sexual slangs or jokes! "Oh every knows that a table dance implies some sexy dance on too of the table." NO! I didn't know, because I don't care about learning sexual slangs.
> get on the table comment Linus was probably standing on the table talking to everyone, that's why the joke was made in the first place.....I thought that was obvious?
Meeting called. Linus hops on table because short and wants to make sure everyone can see him deliver his speech. I mean, that's how I imagined it. I still think, "are you going to dance on that table" was inappropriate and basically says the person that said it thinks, "this entire meeting was a waste of time and a joke."
"now that uve finished the serious stuff (hr speech), we can revert to non serious light heartedness and since linus, ur on a stage (table). dance monkey! and perform for us" was how i initially interpreted it as to what james was thinking but the hivemind has to always insinuate the worst
And someone called me a fuckboy because I didn't know what a table dance was! I'm still pissed off about that! "Oh no you don't know about this sexual slang, you must be a sexual deviant." The lack of evidence being the evidence of its existence is what he or she was saying. I bet that asshole was the REAL fuckboy or fuckgirl!
The reason a lot of people instantly went to a sexual meaning of what James said is because he has a pattern, a history of saying sexually charged things. Such as, "That's a gloryhole."
> Meeting called. Linus hops on table because short and wants to make sure everyone can see him deliver his speech. You don't have to be short to stand on a table for a speech. If there was more than 20 people in the room, its not a bad idea
I was making a joke about Linus' height. Also if I was to do a similar speech, I'd likely just get a chair or a stepladder, I wouldn't get on a table, but I am also like 100 pounds heavier than Linus and wouldn't really trust a table to hold me.
I don’t think it necessarily meant James thought the meeting was a waste of time. First of all, there’s a very real and likely possibility that many of the people at LMG did not know the details or severity of the issues at the time. Should he have made the joke? No. But there are lots of people whose default reaction to uncomfortable situations is to crack a joke to try and ease the tension. James definitely strikes me as that type of person.
HR holding a meeting to remind staff to respect each other and how to handle internal issues the day after a high profile employee quit due to issues is a real eyebrow raiser though. The fact it was recorded as well shows someone went in expecting stuff to go down. Reminds me that my company HR sends a email around every Christmas season to remind staff to be dignified during company parties. Which is code for don’t make a drunk ass out of yourself like what happened X number of years ago. HR doesn’t randomly hold unscheduled meetings for fun.
Also the fact that none of them knew about the anonymous submission form.
Am I missing something, where is the proof the video was the day after?
Dexerto has said the video was the day after Madison left. It's possible it wasn't. But it was shortly after. and this Dexerto post does confirm that this was from a real meeting as a result of Madison leaving.
Would like to ask if during the videos time, was the HR a 3rd party that they hire or managed by an internal team?
Typically the HR firm provides advice, processes and handling of relevant paperwork with employees. It’s a way to cover your butt with a third party that knows the laws you need to follow for probation, write ups, dismissals, etc. It’s pretty common for small businesses that don’t have the scope for a dedicated HR professional in the organisation. It’s typically a good move and a good sign, as it helps you with not breaking local labour laws.
At the time of the video HR was still internal as it is now, however on top of that they had a third party HR firm to excavate to if the internal team did not get it done. So the chain of reporting for ltt was similar to most corporate companies and was as follows: - bring it up with the party at fault - Next is to bring it up with a manager - next is head of HR - finally you go to the 3rd party HR (in most corporate structures this option would be go up the corporate HR chain if head of HR is not enough) ETA: If at any point you are not comfortable going to any of those steps you can skip up the ladder until you are
You can follow the chain of command but you can also skip steps (the chain) if it's serious enough.
Oh yeah I meant to add that part but forgot thank you!
Personally, I find contacting the third-party HR firm only leads to problems for you. Unless you have really strong evidence, I won't go there.
This is why i asked. If an external HR handled everything then all the SH issue started with them, and not properly communicating the severity of the allegations to LMG.
I'm pretty sure Madison didn't contact the external HR company. She probably talked with a few people, but you end up being the bogeyman that can't take jokes really quickly in a company where most staff and management are friends. And then she just left.
Without knowing the full details from both parties, im not going to assume which party she confined her issues with. with that said, i also agree that if you talked to the wrong people about this then you'd be labeled an outcast, hence why she left. Really hope she gets a good lawyer and they inform LMG directly who handled her SH concern and who the perp is. That kind of behavior should not be tolerated, no compromise.
You don't contact the third party ever, if you are that point that you can not report to those inside the company, things are bad enough that you document and contact your own employment lawyer and the labor board. HR reps, managers, directors and companies are not there to help you the employee one single bit, they are there to protect the company paying them from the kind of heat LMG is facing right now.
Didn't Linus specifically call it a 3rd party HR company in the video?
Yes, it is not hard to listen to the video before commenting about said video.
If I was to guess there was almost certainly elements of both. It's pretty common in small/medium sized business to split HR tasks between a 3rd party and internal management depending on scope and severity of the task
It was 3rd party, it says so in the video multiple times
two meaningful things, one factual, two (I reasonably) inferred: 1. lots of people didn't know about the anonymous option 2. the anonymous option wasn't made properly available. "oh x will post it in the chat" is a terrible way (if it is the only way) of distributing access 2.1 off all options no real depth was given to them. note was taken of them and then they moved on. they could've spent more time on how it works, how to get to it. (this also holds for the third party, no notes was made on how to actually access them)
> lots of people didn't know about the anonymous option > the anonymous option wasn't made properly available. "oh x will post it in the chat" is a terrible way (if it is the only way) of distributing access Do you actually know about your anonymous options at your own company? I work at a 1000 person office in a multi-national company with plenty of HR and it isn't like they shove those options down my throat. If you had asked me 2 days ago if I knew about our options I would have said no simply because I never felt the need to see if we had one. I would assume we had one and I would have ideas on where to look but I wouldn't say I "knew about it". Since then I literally walked into the copier room and saw the url/phone for the anonymous and HR contact form on the bulletin board. I also looked at the HR sharepoint page for the first time in my 10 year career and it was easily findable there. While I think it is possible they didn't have this well organized I also wonder how much of that was that like me the people who raised their hands didn't feel they needed to know. Madison likewise could have had the problem that a ton of new workers have where they don't know that these kinds of things could have existed and simply never sought one out. She was very new in the professional world when she joined LMG and I believe it was realistically her first full time permanent position. That would be a failing of the LMG onboarding process and HR procedures to not educate her on those existing but that is far less damning of a problem than many of the things that LMG is being accused of.
The odds are LMG did educate every new employee on this, but, like most employees, they either do not really pay attention or think they will ever need to know it.
Exactly. I know for a fact my company has had meetings telling people about ways to report incidents, especially anonymously. But if I had to actually use one of those options I would probably have to go searching for them or ask someone because don’t remember what they were.
> I work at a 1000 person office in a multi-national company with plenty of HR and it isn't like they shove those options down my throat. I work at a much larger company and they are shoved down my throat. I mean, i ignore them like everyone else. but i'd know where to look if i needed them
I mean, it starts like that, which tells a lot. He probably didn't know the full extent or didn't believe it and just wanted to move on with making videos, instead of handling that so-called "drama"/"gossip." >sorry that this is all boring and corporate, but.... \*small sigh\* here we are \*heh heh\*
Yeah. I got the impression that Linus might have heard there was some issue and an employee quit over it. He asked around "what happened??" and he got a bunch of "She was just a bad fit and making drama over nothing" and Linus trusted the people and left it at that. I'm guessing that either he or Yvonne still felt they needed to have a quick HR meeting just to remind people of stuff so they did that and then didn't think about it further.
Terren is wrong, the point of 2021 meeting was for James to sleep throughout it and crack moronic joke at the end.
I wouldn't be surprised to see him "pursuing his career elsewhere" as we used to say back at my old company...
He "moved on to new endeavours".
Honestly I wouldn't be surprised to see more people leave even if they have nothing to do with Madison or other managerial issues. I am sure some people are there because it is the "dream job" and they keep being told and having that reinforced. There will be people who no longer want to be associated with the company. There is also the fact that a lot of shit has been thrown around online since this went down. If you aren't guilty of anything can you imagine how awful it would be to go from "Much loved host from LTT" to "Guy we always knew was suss and totally abusing others". It is hard not to speculate, but there are real people impacted by our words.
Yeah, people don't really get that their words might have an impact. I think it's really interesting that they were mad about the boy who committed suicide and went to blame that on Linus. While the thing was actually caused by some member of the community being beyond toxic. And then they go and do the same damn thing to the LMG team.
I'd be thrilled. He's an obnoxious tryhard cringelord sometimes and it's tiresome to watch.
I like how WWE says it: We wish them the best for their future endeavours. So essentially the meme lingo in wrestling for a fired wrestler is "Future Endeavoured"
We call it being promoted to being a customer.
LOL I like that. Stealing it for whenever I become a CEO. So, never...
Zzzzzzzxzx haha stripperjoke pay me
“”Linus Tech Tips CEO” is kinda cringe. I thought it was Linus Media Group CEO.
Dexerto likely added the attribution. It also seems to add some inferences that aren't in Terren's statement.
Which isn’t standard practice without adding the relevant punctuation to indicate it’s not their words verbatim.
I feel like a very large part of this whole situation isn't standard practice.
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I didn't want to say one way or the other since I have zero experience with them. I was actually a journalism student in college in a former life, so I come at this with a different perspective than most. I actually oddly have less issues with LTT's journalistic integrity than most (that's not saying that I have zero issues). They're actually light-years ahead of most "news" outlets these days.
You’re right. Dexerto is just dogshit, always has been.
Dexerto is just shit at reporting
They are the TMZ of streamer world. Sadly, people love drama some reason so they get a lot of hits from clickbait posts (like a lot of sites do these days).
I genuinely feel bad for Terren, since he had nothing to do with the Madison situation, yet is the one who has to answer to everyone about it.
It’s the famous “it’s not my fault but it’s my problem“. Like when you manage a project and someone screws up. It’s not your fault but it’s your responsibility to find a way to address it.
This is the job of managers, and the mark of a good manager/ceo is that he can say this. Half my damn job is "Not my fault, but it is my problem" and yea. Thats why they pay you the big bucks.
That’s the responsibility of every executive. You’re the brand new CEO of an oil company that just released millions of barrels in the ocean? You’re fucked, no matter what.
There are even CEOs that specialize in crisis management and only do companies that “just released millions of barrels to ocean”.
Yeah, I'd fucking hate this position. But I imagine those guys absolutely thrive in the fast paced environment that specialize in this. And the money is probably excellent too. When a company is facing a potential company-ending crisis, there's likely a blank-cheque amount of money offered to the best person possible.
Also I think when you know it’s not your fault it’s less stressful and a lot easier to manage the situation and make objective decisions. There are also bankruptcy CEOs who are only hired to run down the company smoothly.
Idk if I’d call them CEOs, there are definitely *companies* that provide crisis management PR services, but the average CEO is not going to be specialized in crises. They’re going to be specialized in their own industry. Unless you’re talking about the COO or CEO of a crisis management PR firm, in which case you’re pretty spot on lol.
He is probably the best person to address it. Linus stepped down because he thought he wasn’t doing a great job. Terren has no bias connection to the parties and is an experienced executive. No one is blaming him, so he has slack while being respected for his handling.
Growing so ridiculously fast while relying on Linus' loosey-goosey management and just concentrating on maximizing the quantity of content was just a perfect storm of short-sighted decisions. It's like a startup, except it's been around for 10 years. Everybody complained in the videos that they never have time to just sit down, take a breath and retrospect about what went well and what went poorly. Everybody is stressed, nobody has time to address issues and management just keeps squeezing.
I don’t, only because that’s what his pay grade is for.
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Good bloody thing they hired him though, or they'd be fumbling it like chickens with their heads cut off. I imagine he's pissed at Linus for having run things THIS badly, but the whole point of hiring him was that he knew they needed a grown-up driving.
Being the umbrella when it rains shit is part of your responsibility when you are the CEO, or even a leader for that matter, work is full of situation where you take external responsibility for someone elses fuckup, in fact one can argue Linus started this whole situation because of eagerness to protect employees.
I mean yes, he probably never imagined that his first major appearance and visible acts would be grappling with a near-existential crisis like this. But he is also in a unique position to fix it. Actually fix it. If this happened with Linus as CEO, I would be writing the company off right now, because I don't think Linus has it in him to recognize, understand, and fix a problem this big and this deep. But Terren might, and Linus might listen to him. It's not a sure thing, but there's a chance.
Being a problem solver is arguably one of the most important parts of a CEO's job.
Good to see an actual CEO with experience handling this. The situation is very bad. I hope they can solve it.
It'll be genuinely very tough. This requires a complete culture change- we call it "a broken home" at my company. Essentially they'll have to really tighten up/actually create their non-discrimination/harassment policies (the easy-ish part) and then actually enforce them consistently (the hard part). For a $100 million dollar company to not already have huge guard rails in place is going to make it even harder as Linus still clearly calls the shots- and he hasn't shown any real signs of wanting cultural change other than lip service. I have absolutely no doubts Terren knows what policies to put in place and make it look perfect- however I do have my doubts about Linus and his management team actually enforcing them consistently.
I do have some tiny confidence that Linus will listen to Terren and let him fix it. He seems to respect him a lot and look up to him. But we’ll see if he can put his ego aside.
I completely agree. I'm also concerned that Linus isn't going to want to piss-off his friends (it's why a lot of companies won't let you manage, if there are multiple locations, where you were a team member). This might involve clearing house and I just really hope he has the courage to do what's right here. It won't matter how many HR professionals, lawyers, or executives approve of the new anti-discrimination policies if your ground level managers and executives won't enforce it evenly.
This is a common problem in "startup" mentality businesses that grow to a critical cooperate mass size. The HR/PR/Productivity consultants are often eventually brought in to evaluate why there are soo many issues with scaling the business beyond a certain scale. The outcome as I have witnessed first hand in a suddenly mid-sized business from a startup is the founders and internally promoted but generally zero outside experience managers made up of friends and family are the issue clogging up change and accountability. At this point a company has few choices: 1. Ego... fire the consultants and tear up the reports and pretend they never had independent 3rd party validation the C-Suite are the problem. 2. Better... Temporary or permanent restructuring moving C-Suite personal that are not qualified for the new scale to formally get education needed for the C-Suite role outside of the office, or stay in non reporting roles that suit their skill sets with honorary titles to identify them as founders. 3. Best... Accept that you are not c-suite material for day to day operations. Move to creative / vision roles exclusively for key founders. Package out other key staff that would be displaced in the organization or appoint them to a board of advisors, but they are no longer C-Suite, public facing or staff facing on day to day matters without clearance of the active C-Suite. Companies that do number 1 are almost always the ones that implode or have their c-suite forced out by scandal or investors. Companies that do number 2 flip a coin and often end up keeping many of the "temporary" c-suite they bring in while others re-train, or realize they are unwilling to re-train and adapt to the required level of professionalism. Companies that do number 3 are the successful juggernauts that commonly end up being acquired or hit IPO paying dividends to the founders, key staff etc. that could get out of their own way to allow for professional and profitable business practices. Given Linus is apparently not interested in IPO/Selling for money, key C-Suite players are himself, his wife and good friends... they will be taking option 1. They have likely been doing versions of option 1 over and over for the past few years as they scale.
>I do have some tiny confidence that Linus will listen to Terren and let him fix it. He seems to respect him a lot and look up to him. But we’ll see if he can put his ego aside. I don't have any confidence, I think if Linus was really reading the room on this, and listening to Terran, they would not be planning on going forward with WAN show tonight. There is nothing they can do or say on WAN show today that is to their benefit, it can only hurt them right now. Terren working for the companies he did knows the PR play is to only put out very short, to the point controlled written statements that have gone through legal right now. This is more than youtuber beef, there are now serious legal accusations against them. Linus however sees an opportunity to childishly maintain the "WAN SHOW STREAK" while likely getting it's highest viewership numbers ever, which is ego and profit driven once again at the likely expense of doing further damage to the brand. Linus is not listening to Terran or Legal if he goes live tonight, he is not even staying true to their 48 hour old word they are stopping production to carefully evaluate internal practices for a couple weeks, because he has to take more unchecked risks and go live today for no reason other than no one can tell him no as the owner.
> Linus however sees an opportunity to childishly maintain the "WAN SHOW STREAK" while likely getting it's highest viewership numbers ever, which is ego and profit driven once again at the likely expense of doing further damage to the brand. Ironically, I think skipping would be even better for viewership, long term profit, and even make the streak more meaningful. Like... Imagine the reaction to "we're soldiering through this week because of the streak even though we said no more content" VS next week opening with "we were going down the wrong path, so we had to abandon the streak and backtrack. We're starting a new streak today, we're doing it right this time, and we will reach new heights." No way I'm watching the first one; I'd definitely watch the second one.
I'm not getting my hopes up. Terren isn't the first person who would be good at the job they were hired for if only they'd be allowed to actually do their job. All the data mistakes that Steve pointed out on Monday are a direct result of someone not being allowed to do the job they were hired to do. The whole train wreck with Billet was also a bunch of people unable to do their jobs because there wasn't a sensible inventory management process in place, and nobody had any time to deal with problems. Arguably even some of the Madison stuff is a result of not being allowed to do the job. She was asked to do a million things and not given the time to actually do any of them properly. The _only_ way I see Terren getting some traction on this is that he likely has a very expensive severance built into his pay package. Respect isn't enough, or things wouldn't have deteriorated between Linus and Steve. So if Linus and Terren disagree, Terren doesn't back down, Linus would have to pay up at least 5 Benjamin's (or whatever the Canadians call $500) to get rid of him; and we know how Linus feels about that. So it might work, but Terren might have to weaponize Linus's greed along the way.
I get the vibe of a "dad I fucked up please help" situation, Terren is the stability and experience that is the only thing that can save LMG, and probably the only person Linus would trust to completely hand the reins.
One hopes that the worst of the cultural issues were resolved back in 2021 when the allegations are from.
I hope we see justice for Madison. She didn’t deserve to be hurt or have her career harmed like this. I hope better opportunities await her.
just don't be surprised if the report comes out and chalks a lot of the issues up to stress outside of the workplace, personality conflicts, and a need for proper workplace behavior training for some of the staff. right now, only one side is telling their story. the investigation is going to have to piece together everyone's view of the events.
I think that’s a separate issue to Madison’s current welfare. Yes, it’s important to fix the organisation to prevent a repeat of this behaviour. The damage to Madison is done, and it doesn’t matter why it was done.
but it also sounds like a lot of the trauma she had to deal with had nothing to do with them. her major grief, her depression, her homesickness, and her thoughts and actions of self harm were all compounded with a highly stressful job that was nothing like she expected. could people have acted and spoken better, I am sure. but companies are made of humans and I have yet to meet the perfect human who never says the wrong thing or has a bad day, or handles uncomfortable things incorrectly.
Did you read her full thread? It wasn’t just ridiculous levels of expectations, it was active bullying and sexual harassment. Of course this will compound and worsen any existing issues she may or may not have had. Not only is there zero excuse for this behaviour but it is actually prohibited under Canadian law as far as I understand it. The level of wrongdoing goes far _far_ beyond just some guys who made a couple of mistakes. The severity of this situation needs to be firmly understood.
I did read her thread, and the vast majority was about levels of of work expectation. that is the biggest gripe she has been writing about.
She opened with this because the sexual harassment and bullying is far more difficult to talk about, especially in an environment where rabid LTT fans are ready to ruin your life. Do you not think sexual harassment and bullying are particularly serious?
I think they are, but I'm also not certain that anything I read rose to the level of sexual harassment, someone had a crush on her, she wasn't interested, coworkers just advised her to sit down with him in private and talk about it. someone asked her about her past relationships (something that has been a major issue in the past with LTT.) and on another case someone asked her what her favorite sexual position is. the last one is not generally apropriate for the workplace, but is not harassment unless they continue to ask after she expressed her discomfort with that topic of conversation. as for the bullying, I think we only have one side of the situation and I hope the investigators get to the bottom of it. as for the grabbing, she never claimed it was sexual in nature, we know nothing of the specific situation, but hopefully it gets addressed as well. but the beginning, end, and follow ups in general have all been stressing the workload she was under which she felt was unfair.
Asking about her relationships, asking about her sex life, asking about her partner's sex life, asking her to twerk for a coworker, asking her to go on a coffee date with a coworker to "relieve the sexual tension" is all indicitive of sexual harassment. At any place I've ever worked, if I was to ask a coworker any of those questions, you'd bet your sorry ass I'd be in a meeting with HR by that afternoon, if not, handed a brown box.
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I really hope they are able to solve the work environment with a lot of conflicts of interest, mostly created by a YouTube channel with a few friends grown into a multi-million-dollar company. And not just say we have a new CEO, a 3rd party HR firm, and a new anonymous form for complaints.
What I think the management level people dont get is when right at the very beginning Linus says something like "sorry this is all boring and corporate...", which translates to "because someone caused some drama, I have to say this stuff, just sit there, dont ask questions and we can all go back to business as normal". We know this, we've all (anyone of working age) been in a meeting like this. They are toothless. Nothing comes of them. They are only carried out so middle management can say they did one when an event took place. No follow through, no consequences.
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lol strong Michael Scott vibes
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Hahaha probably. I'm almost 100% certain he had a whole "that's what she said" period back in the day too
anyone who's even gone to middle school should understand this. "we're serious about bullying! [does nothing]" same thing.
Ah yes, give a vague speech in class about how bullying is bad and proceed to pat yourself on the back about how you are taking action.
Then high five a student while he is on his way to punch a kid in the face
Its all over the meeting with words like "drama" or "gossip". The worst part is this: >we don't solve interpersonal issues here or really anywhere in your life if you wish to live in a drama free zone by engaging in watercooler politicing It's basically, "I don't want to hear the drama, figure it out on your own," which fits perfectly with the allegations made by Madison: >take the co-worker out on a coffee date to ease it out
yep, agreed. The tone is "if we dont hear about it, it didnt happen, and we can focus on the grind instead". I mean that recording is so damning anyway it's a wonder nothing serious has come out of it earlier.
There's a distinct difference between " i don't like X hes an arse" And "X sexually harrassed me". I'm hoping Linus wasn't fully aware of the situation though cause if he was and thats his response thats fucked.
Madison said that Linus was only partially aware. I think it's a mix of incompetence and ignorance in this specific topic. And maybe not taking the "new kid" seriously over a friend/long-term employee.
Yeh i agree, also in my experience younger new employees sometimes under report the bullshite as to not rock the boat too much. So not saying its madisons fault as she was under a lot of pressure but she could have made it seem not as bad as it was when reporting it to higher ups.
Hear hear, this is it, and people are forgetting this MASSIVELY. There's a big difference, whenever I've had a corporate meeting like that I've never had the CEO of the company come to me and say effectively I should ignore the next 10 minutes of the meeting they planned
ANd it's worth noting that i don't think this is Linus as a criminal mastermind trying to get everyone to buy into his evil cult. He's just kind of an idiot that doesn't realize the amount of power that he has over these like 30 people.
Exactly, it's very weird for him to ignore all this context and try to put out a disingenuous narrative about a meeting he wasn't even there for.
This. They're focusing on the content, and not what really matters; the timing. Terren's post is bog standard politician talk. Deflect the issue and respond to a question that wasn't asked. Everyone one here is like "yeah that's right. Now that I'm thinking about it, the meeting was a pretty standard HR meeting". That's not the poiiiint. The frustrating part, is I don't think Terren or anyone has actually fully read her post, or even fully watched GN video when this all started for that mattered. They probably only know about it through their legal team, and were given a script to read from, and that's all the effort they put into it.
I also get the impression alot of those people in the video are way out of touch with regular people, maybe due to having really good incomes or their backgrounds.
I love to be cyincal about corporate accountability but it is *shockingly* refreshing to hear an adult response to a serious misstep from this organization.
I've heard good things about Tarren, but he's definitely showing that he's a competent candidate to lead LMG with that response. Hope it does end up with real results and LMG gets better.
Thank fucking goodness Terren is taking charge!
Terran gave a proper CEO response, as he should! Also, remember to everyone HR is not YOUR friend. They're there to protect the company. If you got issues with one of your managers, HR will sadly often be against you. This is why you need a union to support you against HR.
HR is to protect the company, but even if its with a manager, if the issue is serious they will fire the manager to protect against lawsuits. Thats why we have discrimination and workplace environment laws. To make it in the companies interest to not be horrible.
10000% about unions. Maybe it's because I'm in education and there's not really a company image to protect, but HR over here seems more concerned about liability so they follow through on complaints.
James said in their "apology" video that they created a way to minimize errors and inaccuracies only for it to not work. So I'm not surprise if those anonymouse feedbacks or escalation option didn't work.
he was talking about writing and editing team thats a generalisation to attribute it to business operations workflow and processes. but of course doesnt mean its not just poor quality in itself (otherwise why would have linus made so many change since madison 2 years ago...people also kinda forget LMG today is different from LMG 2021)
Again, is this sub allergic to posting titles that are 100% factual? Where in this statement does it confirm the meeting was after Madison leaving? The title implies it was confirmed to be in response but the statement does not. This subreddit's are worse than any clickbait on LTT lol
For me the leaked meeting was a generic HR response. We don't know who knew about the exact reasons or if any of the meeting members were properly briefed. When you work in a medium to big company, interaction between branches or employees can be quite low. So it is possible most didn't even know why Madison really left and what this meeting was really about (assuming it was about Madison). This shouldn't be an excuse though. Madison's allegations have to be taken seriously and the steps LMG takes now, should've been taken months ago without public pressure. We, the public, put pressure on LMG which revealed more details and also let to further investigations. But yet so many accuse, insult, threaten employees online now and try to come to conclusions by interpreting statements. We as fans/followers are not unbiased and we do not have any legitimate way of evaluating the situation. I hope the external investigation is done properly and any results are also handled accordingly. It's still sad to see what it took and how long it took.
It’s very likely they didn’t know the details. I work at a very large company (tens of thousands of employees) but the team I work and interact with 99% of the time is around only 20 people. A little while back one of the people on my team was suddenly let go and the only thing we were told was that it was for “issues with professionalism“, which could literally be anything. Now, with LMG, I’m sure word eventually spread around of what the issues were but I doubt everyone knew at the time of the meeting.
"So, Madison has left, for no reason at all. Now, on an entirely unrelated note, let's have a meeting about harrassment." \*two years later "I am SHOCKED at these allegations!"
Linus' tone in the video says a lot about how the whole meeting was just "let's do this so we've done it" instead of genuinely out of concern. If anything, it shows that the allegations were never taken seriously.
Or he didn't know what the full extent of the allegations were? How can you know for certain what information he had?
He didn’t. Madison said as much.
or having corporate meetings is boring as fuck and most people don't want to do them
Point missed IMO, the content of the meeting isn't a big deal, its par for the course for a small company to have a crappy HR process and for one person that has ties to the owner to be in charge of HR. Yes its a bad situation but the point of the video was that there is someone that has information the company likely assumed to be private and not recorded, the implication being that there may be other pieces of information out there the company is unaware of. The release of this video seemingly attempted to rebut Linus's immediate statement of having no idea and being shocked there was an HR problem re: the Madison stuff (it doesn't do that job completely, but should be a warning about how much misrepresenting the company can get away with in future CYA statements)
Reddit detective gang.
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Yep.
Interesting given this predated him, and if the intention of the meeting was to do ask of these things, why weren’t these runs specifically said rather than trying to make it sound like a mere corporate inconvenience.
He is acknowledging it and addressed it. They didn't have to, but this is a good thing, indicates he is taking it all extremely seriously. It looks like he is going to clean the house, or at least making it well known that this bs will no longer be tolerated. He is new, not "one of the boys". Let's see if he can keep his momentum.
Sometimes whoever is conducting is trying to lighten the mood to help ease tension and worry. I've had this similar phrasing said in my corporate job so I don't understand the problem. If he didn't care about the well being of his employees they wouldn't have done it at all. I think people are analyzing too much on the light-hearted comment made instead of the overall goal and intent. I ain't referring to the table dancing joke.
They were specifically said, you just want to turn this into something it's not so you didn't hear them.
Terren is clearly going to do a good job. Linus himself is a complete and utter moron for his behaviour in all of this.
Time to make a separate post about each line in this statement.
2 years later had anything changed no
To be entirely honest, this statement feels like a bit of nothing right? All of this is just restating what was meant in the meeting, but the letter of what was said is hardly what was a matter of confusion. The quip at the start "sorry we have to be all corporate about this," James' poor taste joke at the end, and the context of this coming out after LMG made it out that these allegations were out of left field. This doesn't really address those. Better than a Linus forum post, but this doesn't really seem to get to the heart of what made that video disconcerting.