Rant time

[Networking Wolf]

15 hours ago, Misanthrope said:

I'd say normally that while the points are valid it takes a long time to run all benchmarks and such...if it wasn't for the fact that they have like 10 fucking people working over there. Seriously maybe hire less editors and hire another slick to help instead? Or 2 or 3 of them? 

problem is and I have thrown this out there before they cant "pay to hire more people" which to this I call bs. With all their sponsors they do get some kick back and on top of that look at this website http://socialblade.com/youtube/user/linustechtips (I understand this could be way wrong but I will be using these numbers and not trying to figure out how much they get through sponsors.) If they pay each of the employees $32,000 a year that comes to being $320,000 (32,000 * 10) that is not that much when you think about it in the ways of having to employee people. On top of this they have to pay for the cost of running the place. http://www.ontario-hydro.com/electricity-rates-by-province ( I am going at the average price for 2000 kwh which if it is that high tells me they are wasteful not judging) For electricity 218.8 for land cost my guess is they are  about at max maybe 10,000 (this is a blown out of the water cost because I cant find an exact number) on top of that I will also factor in another 50,000 for anything out there that I haven't mentioned. This brings it to 380,218.8 (give or take) If anyone wants to correct my numbers go for it\. With this all being set in mind that tells me that they could bring on one or two more people and produce two videos a day.

[Misanthrope]

Youtube's social blade is far from accurate: it can be a lot less than that (but in fairness to your point, a lot more also). However your point still stands given just how many employees they currently have. Obviously there's cash and I'm sure there's important business reasons for the new hires and such but there's something to be said about letting the quality of one of your main products go down because of all of this other management needs, which should be always secondary to production which in their case is making content.

[Networking Wolf]

2 minutes ago, Misanthrope said:

Youtube's social blade is far from accurate: it can be a lot less than that (but in fairness to your point, a lot more also). However your point still stands given just how many employees they currently have. Obviously there's cash and I'm sure there's important business reasons for the new hires and such but there's something to be said about letting the quality of one of your main products go down because of all of this other management needs, which should be always secondary to production which in their case is making content.

And I can understand not wanting to have the quality of a product go down as mass production becomes the business but everyone defending them for not having enough money to bring on more staff to help out around the office is flat. They need to bring either A) another person to help with benchmarks or B) another person to be a main face in front of the camera. They have content which is coming out that I have found it at other locations in YouTube. Also they were able to afford to send everyone to Mexico so  yea just throwing that out ther

[nicklmg]

15 hours ago, Jstone said:

This might get me banned but anyone else get the feeling that Linus has sold out to razor with the latest video. He glorifies the blade but never addresses all the problems you hear about here on the forum. Am I the only one? if so sorry

Sharing an opinion won't get you banned  especially sharing an opinion about members of our team (as long as you're staying within the community rules). We always appreciate the feedback.

 

Linus has used an iteration of the Blade for the last 3(?)ish years as his daily driver laptop. To my knowledge, up until this point we have NEVER received a penny from Razer's Blade team (we had a promotional budget for the WAN Show Razer Comms stuff we did a couple years back, but again to my knowledge that's the only promotional work we've ever done with Razer up until this point). With that said, we have an upcoming partnership with Razer for PAX and a couple other events through the end of 2016, but as with all of our advertising partnerships, that is totally separate entity from any editorial aspect of our business.

As someone with access to whatever laptop he would like, Linus has chosen to use the Blade. This was motivated by his personal experience with the Blade and other laptops. And of course, as the Blade has created what he considers the "gold standard" for current laptops, that is the point of comparison for any "challengers" in the space. I'm sure that if Linus had experienced the same problems with the Blade, he would bring them up in their entirety. Hiding issues hurts our reputation, DEFINITELY hurts the consumer, and (believe it or not) hurts the manufacturer/seller, as it inhibits them from improving their product. That is not something that we ever aim to do.

15 hours ago, KuJoe said:

Isn't the Razer Blade 14 Linus' primary laptop? If he's willing to use it daily and trust it with his business than that does say something IMO.

Yes it is, and I would agree.

15 hours ago, Misanthrope said:

I'd say normally that while the points are valid it takes a long time to run all benchmarks and such...if it wasn't for the fact that they have like 10 fucking people working over there. Seriously maybe hire less editors and hire another slick to help instead? Or 2 or 3 of them? 

Believe it or not, it's incredibly difficult to find suitable people for the job. Product testing is, in many cases, monotonous, time-consuming, requires a significant knowledge-base, and requires a level of autonomy that (in our experience) many people simply aren't capable of.

We've been trying to hire pre-production staff (product testing, benchmarking, writing) for the past 2 years. We've got some great additions to the team in that process, but in many cases they get placed on other projects based on skillset once they're integrated into the company (eg. Jon was intended to be a "pre-production support" guy doing benching and writing for the LTT team, but he was so darn good at writing Tech Quickie scripts that he does that essentially full-time now).

15 hours ago, dalekphalm said:

What they really need are a few more multi-talented staff who can help Luke with the benches when needed, but then can handle other things or assist as more general labourers (In the sense that they have some skills in shooting, set building, lighting, editing, camera operating, benchmarking, pc building, etc).

 

The problem with simply hiring more people just to bench is, what are they gonna do during the often long stretches in between interesting product launches?

We're trying to hire more people in that stream. And that is a GREAT point that most people overlook. Release season lasts a few weeks to a few months. We have to figure out what those people are doing with the other 44-50 weeks out of the year, and in our experience, once the company becomes reliant on that job that those people do 44-50 weeks out of the year, it's very tough to pull them away from that to run the benchmarks that they were originally hired to run haha... It's a bit of a vicious cycle.

15 hours ago, Misanthrope said:

1) Running benchmarks doesn't necessarily needs a full time employee: during busy seasons an intern working temporary can easily and gladly get paid to just run benchmarks all day

2) It was my impression that they always were looking for multi talented people but well that's kinda like asking for a "full stack developer". Everybody asks for someone really talented in everything from photoshop all the way to php and sql programming and maintaining servers. Yet most of the time nobody is willing to actually pay for such an employee: I suspect that reality is something Linus is familiar with at this point: a start up like him really can't afford a guru yet. Even most lightly multi talented people might be priced out of his range tbh.

3) This is a though one since this might just be because of the direction he wants to go with but there's plenty of things to try even during downtime: New games come out all of the time for example a performance guide for Deus Ex or No man's sky can easily be made. There's also many videos they just don't do as often anymore like let's try old hardware, let's try to use old cards on newer games, etc.

 

I think there's plenty to do for a "bencher" and "builder" even when there's no new hardware out but again I can't tell if this kinds of videos are less frequent due to lack of time or lack of interest: Linus often changes his mind about the overall direction of his business and that's valid of course.

1. Solid point in most cases, but this isn't a job sorting packages that someone can come in and half-ass for two weeks making some extra summer income between semesters at University. This is benchmarking keystone PC products, the results of which are going to be viewed by hundreds of thousands, if not over a million, people. We need someone we can trust enough to do this autonomously without forcing Linus or Luke to go over every aspect of their work with a fine-toothed comb (as that would entirely defeat the purpose of hiring that person to begin with). We've tried the "just hire some random dude to do benchmarks all day" thing a couple times and it DOES NOT work well for us.

So TL;DR yes we need more people on the pre-production team, no it's not as simple as getting an intern for a couple weeks out of the year.

2. We've tried hiring low-skill or focused-skill people for specific jobs. It doesn't work out well in our business, mainly due to the level of autonomy and self-motivation that is required in every position. Our approach to hiring isn't the result of guesswork or assumptions, it's entirely trial-and-error.

 

3. I'd love for us to try all of those things. But that totally goes against point 2. in your post as those ideas each require skill, experience, and product knowledge. You're not going to get an untrained intern to do that stuff (at least not to the level that we expect :P).

Generally changes in strategy and content styles are due to lack of response and lack of interest from the audience. Again, we operate almost entirely via trial-and-error.

8 hours ago, MrDynamicMan said:

And not to bang a dead horse again but the G5 review seriously sucked. He was talking like the 6s and S7 edge were one phone with no downsides at all.

The 6S and the S7 are both incredible phones right now. I don't think it's fair to say we ever claimed that they had no downsides, but they are the "gold standard" when it comes to smartphones nowadays, and therefore were used as points of comparison for a new entry to the market.
 

Regarding the G5, I'll just leave this here... http://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/lg-restructuring-g5-sales/
 

If that's not a statement about the overall performance and reception of the G5 as a market entry, then I don't know what is.

7 hours ago, ThinkWithPortals said:

What just kind of irritated me was that he referred to the Aero 14 as a "poor man's Razer Blade" even though it still costs one thousand six hundred dollars.

 

And while we're at it, was anyone else disappointed with the Dan case review? I mean, it was all well and good, but no CPU/GPU temperature graphs for load and idle? Noise measurements? A thermal image, perhaps? I just felt they could have gone into a lot more depth with that one, a unique case deserves a unique review.

 

@nicklmg @CPotter could you bring this thread to Linus/Luke's attention? There are a lot of good points in this thread.

 

EDIT: Holy shit, 4000 posts on this forum.

You are totally misinterpreting the meaning of the "poor man's" idiom.

"a poor man's somebody/something
someone or something that is similar to a well-known person or thing but is not as good"

Calling the Aero 14 a "poor man's Blade" does not mean that people who are spending $1600 on a laptop are considered "poor," nor does it mean that the Aero 14 is a cheap product. It means that it's a cheaper, but relatively comparable competitor to the Blade, in which some sacrifices have been made to save on production costs.

If you take issue with the use of that idiom, then I apologize (I guess?...)? It's a very common phrase, people are just misinterpreting the meaning.

I didn't really see the DAN Case review as any different than our other case reviews. Could we have gone more in-depth? Of course. Would anyone watch an 18 minute video about it? Sure, some would. But the majority of our audience would complain that it was too long and too granular.

2 hours ago, Misanthrope said:

Here's a different kind of constrain I honestly did not consider until right now: Time. Not as in the time it takes to do benchmarks and such, but the overall length of the video they're aiming for. Other than the Vive backpack video lately videos are fairly short (Even that one felt a bit rushed could have easily been a 3 parter) and if you look at OC3D and Tiny Tomlogan (or whatever he goes by) he really goes into a lot of depth, tons of charts, many benchmarks, etc. And his videos are usually at least 20 minutes long if not more like 30 or 40 minutes.

 

For whatever reason (Since youtubers usually prefer longer videos that give more overall viewtime vs short ones given the way the youtube algorytm works) they want to keep their videos fairly short. And considering they're doing about 40 seconds to a minute of sponsor integration stuff on a 5 minute video, it really leaves very little time to work in many needed details.

 

Maybe they're going for "as fast as possible" on both channels now who knows.

This is a huge point that many people overlook. Watchtime is a metric that we pay VERY close attention to, and we use those stats to model future video duration.

Of course, if we feel that a topic deserves a longer video to be presented properly, then we aren't going to limit that based on statistics. But we do have goal lengths for videos based on past experiences - again, trial-and-error approach.

4 minutes ago, Jstone said:

I don't think I have seen a video where he has pointed out some of the big issues I have heard of on here such as over heating due to the aluminum case

 

thank you I don't wanna bash anyone just getting tired of everyone hoping on the razor band wagon

 

I'm sure that if Linus experienced the same issues he would address them in full. I've never once heard him complain of his Blade overheating. Maybe that's due to the scenarios in which he uses it normally (in temperature-controlled areas, on flat, hard surfaces rather than on a lap, bed, or couch with a soft surface), or maybe it's dependent on what kind of binning takes place with the CPUs/GPUs.
 

Again, if Linus was experiencing those issues, I'm sure he would address them in his review.

[nicklmg]

42 minutes ago, Jstone said:

problem is and I have thrown this out there before they cant "pay to hire more people" which to this I call bs. With all their sponsors they do get some kick back and on top of that look at this website http://socialblade.com/youtube/user/linustechtips (I understand this could be way wrong but I will be using these numbers and not trying to figure out how much they get through sponsors.) If they pay each of the employees $32,000 a year that comes to being $320,000 (32,000 * 10) that is not that much when you think about it in the ways of having to employee people. On top of this they have to pay for the cost of running the place. http://www.ontario-hydro.com/electricity-rates-by-province ( I am going at the average price for 2000 kwh which if it is that high tells me they are wasteful not judging) For electricity 218.8 for land cost my guess is they are  about at max maybe 10,000 (this is a blown out of the water cost because I cant find an exact number) on top of that I will also factor in another 50,000 for anything out there that I haven't mentioned. This brings it to 380,218.8 (give or take) If anyone wants to correct my numbers go for it\. With this all being set in mind that tells me that they could bring on one or two more people and produce two videos a day.

Socialblade's earning stats are totally ridiculous. When your range for annual earnings is "$89.1K - $1.4M," you're working with garbage statistics. Their subcount and viewcount trackers are great (I use them on a daily basis), but in my opinion Socialblade should remove their earnings calculator as it's entirely misleading.

 

1. I don't know when we've ever said that we "can't pay to hire more people." We've continued to grow our team massively over the last 2 years, going from 6 people when I joined the company full-time in May 2014 to 15 at this moment. The main issue is that the hiring pool is extremely limited.

 

2. If you expect to pay skilled people $15 (pre-tax) an hour in the Lower Mainland (a place with an extremely high cost of living) then best of luck to you... The average pre-tax salary in Canada is $49,000 per year. You have to remember that salary is far from the only cost of an employee - there's Canada Pension Plan fees, Employment Insurance fees, medical benefits that are expected by most skilled workers, and a multitude of other costs.

With all of that said, money is far from the only factor in the grand scheme of hiring people. Team fit, skillset, knowledge base, etc... Couple that with the insane international hiring practices that the Canadian government has in place, and you've got yourself a real crappy situation lol.

33 minutes ago, Jstone said:

And I can understand not wanting to have the quality of a product go down as mass production becomes the business but everyone defending them for not having enough money to bring on more staff to help out around the office is flat. They need to bring either A) another person to help with benchmarks or B) another person to be a main face in front of the camera. They have content which is coming out that I have found it at other locations in YouTube. Also they were able to afford to send everyone to Mexico so  yea just throwing that out ther

We're working on hiring for both of those jobs. You seem to be COMPLETELY overlooking the fact that both are extremely niche jobs, and that a vast majority of the population would not be well-suited for either role. 

[Misanthrope]

I suspected it woudn't be easy to hire people true, yet "benchmarks" in and of themselves are not incredibly complicated: yes you do need knowledge of hardware and such but you still got Linus and Luke around, doubt they need to waste their efforts in running the same tech demo or game run 300 times and record the results vs seeing "Ok this result is way too different and doesn't makes sense, help please".

 

However as for your other points about your workstyle and the type of self motivated, independent employee you want I can see that and I can see why finding someone has been tough. Going totally against your employee model is not advisable but maybe a happy medium could be found: the most useful intern in all of Canada that still doesn't expects quite as big of a paycheck as someone who's a pro.

 

Happy hunting.

[nicklmg]

4 minutes ago, Misanthrope said:

I suspected it woudn't be easy to hire people true, yet "benchmarks" in and of themselves are not incredibly complicated: yes you do need knowledge of hardware and such but you still got Linus and Luke around, doubt they need to waste their effords in running the same tech demo or game run 300 times and record the results vs seeing "Ok this result is way too different and doesn't makes sense, help please".

 

However as for your other points about your workstyle and the type of self motivated, independent employee you want I can see that and I can see why finding someone has been tough. Going totally against your employee model is not advisable but maybe a happy medium could be found: the most useful intern in all of Canada that still doesn't expects quite as big of a paycheck as someone who's a pro.

 

Happy hunting.

Running benchmarks is not complicated, true. Setting up a test scenario, in many cases, may be. If Linus and/or Luke is expected to be holding the hand of the benchmarker for half of their day, they're going to probably actually end up being less productive than if they just ran the benchmarks themselves due to the interruptions of their workflow. Switching between projects regularly can actually be a huge issue for the sake of productivity - again, just in our experience, not saying this is true for all jobs/companies/etc.

It's more an issue of the approach and management of the tasks rather than the tasks themselves, if that makes sense.

Thank you!  We hope to have updates on new team members soon.

[Networking Wolf]

14 minutes ago, nicklmg said:

Socialblade's earning stats are totally ridiculous. When your range for annual earnings is "$89.1K - $1.4M," you're working with garbage statistics. Their subcount and viewcount trackers are great (I use them on a daily basis), but in my opinion Socialblade should remove their earnings calculator as it's entirely misleading.

 

1. I don't know when we've ever said that we "can't pay to hire more people." We've continued to grow our team massively over the last 2 years, going from 6 people when I joined the company full-time in May 2014 to 15 at this moment. The main issue is that the hiring pool is extremely limited.

 

2. If you expect to pay skilled people $15 (pre-tax) an hour in the Lower Mainland (a place with an extremely high cost of living) then best of luck to you... The average pre-tax salary in Canada is $49,000 per year. You have to remember that salary is far from the only cost of an employee - there's Canada Pension Plan fees, Employment Insurance fees, medical benefits that are expected by most skilled workers, and a multitude of other costs.

With all of that said, money is far from the only factor in the grand scheme of hiring people. Team fit, skillset, knowledge base, etc... Couple that with the insane international hiring practices that the Canadian government has in place, and you've got yourself a real crappy situation lol.

We're working on hiring for both of those jobs. You seem to be COMPLETELY overlooking the fact that both are extremely niche jobs, and that a vast majority of the population would not be well-suited for either role. 

As I stated in that post " If anyone wants to correct my numbers go for it" I also understand social blade is very blown out of the water. here in the states $32,000 is what you average for entry level jobs or start up company (usually) as far as teaching people how to do benchmarking it is easy. You take them through a week crash course and then give them 2 weeks to see if they sink or swim. Failure to swim you fire them and bring someone else in. This is how many places are ran. Im just throwing this out there overall I think you guys make great videos except for baking a gpu... nuff said on that one. (you actually made me a lot of money on people being stupid enough to try it and frying their gpu so I do have to say thank you) I just wish you would throw out multiple videos in a day. I run my own small computer repair business and this is how I run things. I understand though each company is different

 

[nicklmg]

2 minutes ago, Jstone said:

As I stated in that post " If anyone wants to correct my numbers go for it" I also understand social blade is very blown out of the water. here in the states $32,000 is what you average for entry level jobs or start up company (usually) as far as teaching people how to do benchmarking it is easy. You take them through a week crash course and then give them 2 weeks to see if they sink or swim. Failure to swim you fire them and bring someone else in. This is how many places are ran. Im just throwing this out there overall I think you guys make great videos except for baking a gpu... nuff said on that one. (you actually made me a lot of money on people being stupid enough to try it and frying their gpu so I do have to say thank you) I just wish you would throw out multiple videos in a day. I run my own small computer repair business and this is how I run things. I understand though each company is different

 

Yep I can totally see where you're coming from with that, was just giving my 2c on the topic. Sorry if it came across as aggro or anything.

In terms of the 3-week trial thing, we've done that. It usually ends up with Luke and I working 20-hour days fixing whatever the trial person screwed up and them not lasting more than 2 weeks

Due to our experience we have pretty stringent hiring practices. Nothing is worse than wasting a whole lot of time on someone only to have them be a poor fit for the position - as someone with your own SMB I'm sure you can appreciate that! Haha

Well I'm glad it helped you out personally at least, haha. And hopefully the collab video with Louis Rossmann was a satisfactory recovery


In terms of multiple videos per day, it's doubtful we'll ever move toward that type of strategy outside of event coverage, simply due to the way YouTube's algorithm highly favors daily release channels over more and less frequent release strategies. Look at a channel like IGN's. Of course, one could argue that their reputation precludes most viewers from consuming much of their content, but I believe that at least some of the low viewcounts on their channel are due to the massive volume of content they produce. In written or self-hosted video content, more content is definitely better as you control how the content is served via your homepage. On YouTube, the more content you release every day, the less videos get served to your subscribers.

Overall, of course you may drive more views. But on a per-video interaction basis (which is what helps you really grow in shares due to the YouTube algorithm), you're in the dumpster.

Anyway, thanks for your feedback

[Networking Wolf]

1 minute ago, nicklmg said:

Yep I can totally see where you're coming from with that, was just giving my 2c on the topic. Sorry if it came across as aggro or anything.

In terms of the 3-week trial thing, we've done that. It usually ends up with Luke and I working 20-hour days fixing whatever the trial person screwed up and them not lasting more than 2 weeks

Due to our experience we have pretty stringent hiring practices. Nothing is worse than wasting a whole lot of time on someone only to have them be a poor fit for the position - as someone with your own SMB I'm sure you can appreciate that! Haha

Well I'm glad it helped you out personally at least, haha. And hopefully the collab video with Louis Rossmann was a satisfactory recovery


In terms of multiple videos per day, it's doubtful we'll ever move toward that type of strategy outside of event coverage, simply due to the way YouTube's algorithm highly favors daily release channels over more and less frequent release strategies. Look at a channel like IGN's. Of course, one could argue that their reputation precludes most viewers from consuming much of their content, but I believe that at least some of the low viewcounts on their channel are due to the massive volume of content they produce. In written or self-hosted video content, more content is definitely better as you control how the content is served via your homepage. On YouTube, the more content you release every day, the less videos get served to your subscribers.

Overall, of course you may drive more views. But on a per-video interaction basis (which is what helps you really grow in shares due to the YouTube algorithm), you're in the dumpster.

Anyway, thanks for your feedback

Never thought about the interaction per video aspect. I have been working within computers since 2004 my father has taught me everything I know and now I was a Dell Field engineer and now I run my own small repair shop along with also being an L3 working for the US government

[Networking Wolf]

Just now, Jstone said:

Never thought about the interaction per video aspect. I have been working within computers since 2004 my father has taught me everything I know and now I was a Dell Field engineer and now I run my own small repair shop along with also being an L3 working for the US government

also sorry if I came off as being an ass hat

[nicklmg]

Just now, Jstone said:

Never thought about the interaction per video aspect. I have been working within computers since 2004 my father has taught me everything I know and now I was a Dell Field engineer and now I run my own small repair shop along with also being an L3 working for the US government

That's awesome! Congrats on the success there  

Just now, Jstone said:

also sorry if I came off as being an ass hat

No not at all. Like I said, we definitely appreciate the feedback. Hopefully my replies were able to give you a better idea of the inner workings and a better understanding of why we make the decisions we do.

[Networking Wolf]

1 minute ago, nicklmg said:

That's awesome! Congrats on the success there  

No not at all. Like I said, we definitely appreciate the feedback. Hopefully my replies were able to give you a better idea of the inner workings and a better understanding of why we make the decisions we do.

they did right now im trying to figure out should I go back to the military for cyber security or keep going down my current route which is hard because im >30

[nicklmg]

Just now, Jstone said:

they did right now im trying to figure out should I go back to the military for cyber security or keep going down my current route which is hard because im >30

This is very general advice, but I'd say as long as you can continue to meet any commitments you've made (eg. supporting kids if any, family, mortgage) then follow whatever drives you and ignites your passion.
 

Good luck!

[Networking Wolf]

1 minute ago, nicklmg said:

This is very general advice, but I'd say as long as you can continue to meet any commitments you've made (eg. supporting kids if any, family, mortgage) then follow whatever drives you and ignites your passion.
 

Good luck!

Thanks btw hows the weather by you guys?

[Misanthrope]

3 minutes ago, nicklmg said:

No not at all. Like I said, we definitely appreciate the feedback. Hopefully my replies were able to give you a better idea of the inner workings and a better understanding of why we make the decisions we do.

Hey on top of that you have to think about Berkel sneaking up on you with a bbq sauce baloon or some shit, not an easy gig.

[Yoinkerman]

I imaging it's hard finding knowledgeable tech staff as the people who have the necessary knowledge and drive already have better or similar day jobs as what LMG can offer.  No offense I'm sure working for LMG is pretty great, I'm just being realistic.