So the YouTube channel LinusTechTips, which I have watched grow for nearly a decade now, has come under serious controversy after new revelations and allegations in the past week. The tl;Dr is that combining a 100+ employee, union-less, male dominated company with a culture of "work insanely unreasonably hard and don't complain, you whiny bitch" leads to some awful results.
Now I'm not interested in discussing this particular case, otherwise I would link to it directly and not write something up. Rather, I've noticed that in the past year there has been a flurry of stories about workplaces that suffer from the exact same set of issues as LTT. I haven't seen a lot of US examples yet, but the pattern goes like this:
- someone, usually an overconfident obsessive asshole, starts a company that does something ambitious or bold
- they attract other ambitious people who want to make a dent in the universe
- everyone works their asses off to compensate for their small size, leaving zero room for organizational development
- the company grows rapidly on their succes, but maintains the same attitudes towards work and workers rights ("we don't need a union! We can just deal with things ourselves.")
- most of the new hires get shit from the old guard, and get effectively zero help to deal with that shit
- people flunk out, work themselves to near death or deal with serous harassment and mental health issues
- it all explodes at some point, often with sexual harassment investigations revealing the awful working conditions that disproportionally affect women
Having just departed a work environment that's miles better, but still eerily similar in a few regards, I'm wondering what exactly is going on and what this all means.
Part of this feels like it's a logical extension of #metoo and the post-covid work reform movement finally reckoning with abusive, shitty workplaces. But this is happening so often it seems, especially with any company (or production) that Aims Big, that I'm wondering if it's a more structural problem.
Any thoughts?