LMG is 200 odd people. You could say Nvidia with >10k employees is colossal perhaps, or you could say Cisco with >80k is. 200 people is barely a medium sized enterprise. Christ, the company I work for is nearer 2k people.

And in any of those cases, the size of the entity doesn’t matter - its a very common journalistic practise to seek comment. I tend to think that because GN chose not to, that it veered away from a purely journalistic exercise because they are essentially a competitor. They still have the right to publish it and make the claims they want but it changes the framing of the video quite a bit for me.

Bear in mind that I think all benchmarking is over hyped in its reliability and importance so pretty much none of that side of things holds any real credibility with me at all - so i’m mostly judging GN based on they way they’ve presented this issue.

Finally, Linus didn’t sell the startup’s prototype, LMG did. And unless you’re ignoring the whole trail of fact on that its pretty clear it was a stupid mistake but also how that came to be isn’t some evil genius plan.

Alternative take - playing up to the YouTube algorithm is what has allowed LMG to expand to the point where it provides jobs for over 100 (is it near 200 now?) people. Those people work hard, yet the majority seem to stay with the company which suggests any alternative employment isn’t attractive enough to motivate them to leave their current work conditions.

And LMG would likely be blasted if it wasn’t Linus presenting it as well. Damned if you do / don’t.

That cuts both ways. eg: GN didn’t have the decency - while claiming to do journalism - to do a standard journalist thing and approach LMG for comment. This is all I need to know about GN.

Right? So the CEO is offsite this week. A week runs Mon-Sun. They shot the video probably on Friday.

I would contend that most of the YouTube tech channels, even the ones with great reputations for quality such as Hardware Unboxed and Gamers Nexus are barely educational as well.

While they can point to fewer mistakes made as a result of their methodologies, I don’t believe there is any real scientific value in the conclusions they reach from testing that is far too limited with far too small a sample size. They can paint broad recommendations - product A should be better than product B because our testing showed 20% better numbers.

But when the metric variances between products are small, none of the testing methodologies can really tell you which of the products will work better in your system. They haven’t tested enough of them, and in enough situations to have a clue. And I think any of them claiming that there is inherent value to their methods are really just defending their product which is the video they’re getting eyeballs in front of so they can make money from advertising.

Toxic behaviour should be called out when it happens. That is the time.

When do you think they made the video if not this week?

Face to face means something completely different in 2023 than it did in 2019.

I guess its not just anonymous surveys though is it, its that, plus a low turnover, plus 1-1 feedback sessions and other things I’m probably forgetting. But don’t overlook the conclusion where if you read between the lines, more personnel changes are likely as a result of this.

I think your last point is highly unlikely, there is too much light on this for the issues alleged by Madison to be true, and for LMG to do nothing. But the tricky thing is that the full truth about Madison’s issues is unlikely to be made public, and equally the full action taken by LMG will not be made public. HR, and employment issues kinda require privacy - this isn’t a government or public department, its a private company with responsibilities to employees past & present mandated by law.