amboyscout

I am coming over from the ChiefDelphi FIRST robotics competition forms because i remembered linus was partnered with IFI. Recently, many people have come out accusing IFI of being a awful place to work, sexual assaults, and other horrible things. IFI has released maybe the worst defense i have ever read, insinuating that all of whistleblowers are lying. 

Hello! First time poster. I'm here on behalf of my community to talk about RackSolutions, such as when they were featured in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pyZSqfmN_0I 
 
Recent allegations have come out from former employees involving sexual harassment, toxic workplace environment, and general Activision-Blizzardry.
 
RackSolutions is one of three subsidiaries of Innovation First International (IFI), and they also have ventures in educational (Vex Robotics) and toy (Hexbug) robotics. IFI shares and intermixes a lot of employees between all three of their subsidiaries and their core leadership is largely the same pool of people. Point is, no matter the division, you would likely at some point be coerced into one of the CEO Tony Norman’s house parties.
 
Recently, on the educational competition robotics side of things, a post on a major community forum was made concerning poor quality control on Vex products and questionable customer service practices. However, people soon also discovered IFI’s less-than-stellar Glassdoor page which detailed a very colorful image of how it is to work at IFI and RackSolutions/Vex/Hexbug. The common themes of the complaints are consistent across all three divisions of the company — the suckage permeates everywhere in Greeneville, Texas.
 
It's a heavy story with some disturbing themes, so I'm going to leave the bulk of it behind this spoiler (cw: sexual harassment, general harassment, general Bad Time)
The collective community reaction so far has been intense. Many highschool robotics teams following that thread have sworn off buying IFI/Vex products. Including, notably, 6 of the 9 #TeamIFI teams that the company directly sponsors to promote their brand in FIRST Robotics. [one] [two] [three] [four] [five] [six] with the rest possibly following. All of these teams compete a high level and are generally widely respected in the community. Additionally, many of these teams have smaller classroom-level programs highly reliant on Vex parts and educational material, so switching off IFI products constitutes a non-insignificant financial and labor hurdle.
 
When this story also spread to /r/battlebots, many commentators additionally expressed their wishes to boycott the products IFI sells to them under their Hexbug brand as well (toys, combat robot parts, etc.) One poster even mentioned they were reconsidering applying to IFI for an engineering internship after what they had read. 
 
In conclusion, we, the competition robotics community that helped birth IFI and RackSolutions, have pretty deep concerns, and hope that LMG finds this information useful.
 
edit: I am told that LTT is featured prominently on the RackSolutions homepage: https://www.racksolutions.com/

this is just the companies response after several weeks of allegations against them, i would recommend reading the other CD threads for information on what they actually did. To sum it up, i would recommend you read their glassdoor reviews. The thing that is infuriating about this is that many many credible people came out with detailed explanations of their time there. And then IFI pretty much said "if you were abused by other employees, why didn't you say something", despite the fact that the allegations detail corrupt HR stuff and a culture of abuse where reports were not taken seriously. Its not necessarily that this statement is bad on its own, but in context it is pretty awful.

This is one of many firsthand accounts made by former employees of ifi, racksolutions, hexbug and vex concerning the toxicity in the workplace they endured: https://www.chiefdelphi.com/t/cw-violence-sexual-harassment-ifi-a-toxic-and-predatory-workplace-in-edtech/417760/
 
It is probably the easiest introduction to the topic, but if you want to read more you can enjoy this ~400 reply thread: https://www.chiefdelphi.com/t/cw-sexual-harassment-an-open-letter-to-vex/416929/

https://www.chiefdelphi.com/t/cw-sexual-harassment-an-open-letter-to-vex/416929/345
https://www.chiefdelphi.com/t/does-ifi-still-pay-the-hosting-costs-for-chief-delphi/417686/28
https://www.chiefdelphi.com/t/statement-from-team-33/417734/10
these are a few of like 12 current ongoing threads

It’s probably important to note that a lot of these reference IFI which to an outsider may seem unrelated to LTT, however IFI is the parent company of RackSolutions and by all accounts, experiences like this are happening at all of the subsidiaries of IFI

Yeah, HEXBUG, VEX, and Rack Solutions are their 3 subsidiaries, some of the glassdoor reviews mention the companies by name. 

Should link to Bee217's post? Been a while since i used the forums.
 
Edit: Ill also add in this thread from another former IFI employee that was posted since the original post by Bee217.

A couple quotes, if you do not have the time to read the post (though i highly suggest you do):
 
[cw: violence, sexual harassment]
 
Edit 2: If reading everything from the last few posts is just too much of a timesink (and admittedly, there is a lot), there is a sitrep written up by a couple members of the robotics community that hits the main points  that you can find here.

I would personally want to stay away from everything from innovation first international /rack solutions / vex robotics due to this post on chief delphi.com https://www.chiefdelphi.com/t/cw-sexual-harassment-an-open-letter-to-vex/416929/191

@LinusTechI figured a direct ping here would be better here. I would definitely recommend avoiding anything Rack Solutions or Vex Robotics related in the future, as many highly regarded and respected members of our community have come forward regarding some very serious culture issues from the top down in their company. Many top teams sponsored by IFI have dropped them, with another large number of teams dropping any support in purchasing their products.

Car keys, maybe. Wallet, an even bigger maybe. But I'll never trade my large phone, tablet, PC etc for a ~1.5" watch, that's absurd and stupid. And also, that seems to me like keeping too many eggs in one ill-suited iBasket.
Not to mention that I don't WANT to replace my phone with a watch. I want notifications, time (duh) and MAYBE NFC tricks like payments and car unlocking. Anything else is a waste of battery.
HoloLens might replace my TV, though. A resizeable, hypothetically infinite-resolution TV that moves as I do, letting me do other things while I watch Last Week Tonight? Yes please!

Next you will tell us it is upgrade able.

surely 16 hours of battery for all of your gadgetry and keys and wallet is long enough, right?

stupid, going by iphones performance, i dont want my car keys crashing and need restarting,....

Why not a personal channel with everything you and your team care about mixed in? That way you dont have to limited to just toy and games, you can occasionally do things like costume (like the Starwar costume before) or whatever