What is it like to work for Linus? - Honest Answers Ep. 4
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2017-05-06
·
1,945 words · ~9 min read
0:00
What's it like to work at Linus Media Group?
0:04
Well, I think it's great.
0:06
I mean, my name's on the building.
0:08
You know how that feels, walking up and being like,
0:09
yeah, my name's on the building.
0:11
But if you want the real answer,
0:12
you'll probably have to ask the poor schmucks
0:15
who do the actual grunt work around here.
0:18
So we made a deal.
0:19
They said, if you agree not to watch the video,
0:22
we will give the viewers the real honest answer.
0:25
And I kind of went, okay.
0:28
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0:51
I remember thinking, this guy is so quirky.
0:56
Psychotic.
0:57
Petite.
0:58
Hyperactive insanity.
1:00
Yeah, somewhat, like, insane.
1:02
Slightly insane, like, not much insane.
1:04
I mean, we're not dead in the water yet,
1:06
so, uh...
1:08
I got there at 5.01.
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No answer.
1:10
And my first thoughts are, holy crap,
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this guy is so intense
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that I'm a minute late for my interview,
1:15
he locks up shop, leaves, doesn't even consider me.
1:18
He's coming at you with all this energy
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and all this drive,
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and you just kind of have to match that.
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Like, has no semblance of personal time
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and is more than willing to, like,
1:29
spend every hour of his life working.
1:31
Linus, as a leader, I think,
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has always been specifically good
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at inspiring drastic action.
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And he transforms that once you're already here
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to inspire gratuitous amounts of overtime
1:44
that may or may not be.
1:47
Linus had this idea to make videos
1:50
about building a computer
1:52
to a level that no one else had ever tried to make.
1:55
So this was our first build guide.
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It took us, like, 18 hours.
2:00
Close down the retention ARM.
2:01
Little bit of strength required here.
2:03
I think we finished at, like, 4 a.m.
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I have never...
2:08
I have never regretted anything more
2:09
than taking the job at Linus Media Group
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for the first two weeks.
2:14
And after that, things got a lot better.
2:16
We had so much work to do.
2:18
Linus is very decisive,
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but he's very vague in his decisiveness.
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He doesn't really know
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how you're going to do something,
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just what you're going to do.
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When Linus tells you that something will be done
2:30
in two hours,
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I always double the amount of time in my head.
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And more often than not, I am correct.
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Quite a bit of fun to work for
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in, like, a constantly disorganized
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and a bit wacky kind of way.
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So I've never used a reciprocating saw.
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Ooh!
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And it's plugged in.
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I get kind of weird demands from Linus.
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Like I said, not working with him much,
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I get demands like,
2:53
can you paint my face?
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Can you find this?
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Can you do that?
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So as a leader,
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I'd say he's very random and interesting.
3:00
So I never heard one of my bosses, like,
3:02
fart audibly from across the office before, but...
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If you're wondering at any point
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if we're actually...
3:08
as unorganized and incompetent
3:10
as we seem on camera,
3:12
it's actually like that.
3:14
We're not faking that.
3:15
And actually, this was a mistake.
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I mean, everything about this was a mistake,
3:20
but this in particular, filling the glass,
3:22
that was a mistake.
3:24
He had, like, the jankiest setup.
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And as I walk away,
3:29
the test bench fell.
3:30
And it's probably the scariest moment in my life.
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Linus comes back, everything's on the floor.
3:35
We lost the footage of something
3:37
that had been shot earlier,
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where Linus was installing something in his attic.
3:41
Linus was definitely yelling and swearing.
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Like, I've broken some stuff back since before,
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and he was mad.
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But that's, like, really short,
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you know, a short burst of anger.
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It's very rare where you're freaking out and I'm not.
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I only freak out when it's really, really bad.
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Whenever he's like,
4:00
no, no, it's okay.
4:01
And then he walks away.
4:02
What?
4:02
That's the GPS antenna.
4:05
Yeah.
4:08
Okay.
4:12
Everything is fine.
4:13
Everything is fine.
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And I am calm.
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And once he gets to a certain boiling point,
4:18
you can just, you can feel it.
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I'm kind of mad where he gets really high-pitched and goes,
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I was doing the WAN doc,
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and I messed up one of the topics,
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and he came upstairs and he just said, you're fired.
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And I didn't know if he was joking or not.
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So I just continued working and everything went fine.
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And then about a week later,
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I accidentally copyright striked our channel.
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And then Linus said, you're fired.
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And I thought that time maybe he was serious.
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Cause you know,
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I almost took down the whole channel single-handedly.
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I've had some terrible, terrible bosses.
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Sometimes, you know,
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I've been able to get one,
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either like a boss who knew what they were doing,
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or like a boss who like cares about people.
5:01
But getting both of those together has been a new experience.
5:05
He's really professional,
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like an efficient,
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like he doesn't like to waste time.
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I am nothing if not willing to do things entirely the wrong way
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for the sake of finishing this video right now.
5:16
After 30 minutes of me sitting out front of the door,
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just waiting for somebody to like answer the door.
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He calls me and he goes,
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oh, I completely forgot about her interview.
5:25
And Linus is like, this question is stupid.
5:27
This one's dumb.
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I don't want to ask this one.
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And then he puts it, puts down the paper and goes,
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all right, are you into bestiality?
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Do you watch bestiality?
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I was like the 25th person to get interviewed.
5:40
By the time he got to me and I was last,
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I think he had a real strict regimen of what he wanted to get through.
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And he probably didn't have any time or energy
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to waste on any bullshit.
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Excuse me?
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He's like, yeah, you heard me.
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And I'm like, uh, no.
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And he's like, ha, just messing with you.
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He found my Twitter and read all of my tweets,
6:01
asked me why I tweeted that,
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what that meant, who I follow, why I follow them.
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So that was a little bit offside for me.
6:07
It was fine, but a little bit strange.
6:11
The first interaction I had with Linus,
6:12
actually on the phone, was my first interview.
6:15
It was at an Indian restaurant with his children.
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It was kind of like a first date,
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but someone brought along a baby.
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The whole thing was full of really bad jokes.
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So I was, a lot of nervous laughs and stuff like that.
6:31
Yeah, it was like an interview, but I didn't know it was an interview.
6:34
I was just literally there to have lunch with him.
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One of the things that I actually like about the relationship
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that Linus and I have is I can no filter and he can no filter
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and everyone's fine when we're done.
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When I started, he didn't really know what he was doing.
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I didn't really know what I was doing.
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And we both kind of grew into figuring that out.
6:53
Undo this stupid thing and then undo this other stupid, ridiculous thing.
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They are stupid.
7:00
I'm sure there's stuff that comes up that catches him off guard or whatever,
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but he seems to be pretty on top of everything at all times.
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Very well prepared for everything that comes up.
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I hate when he's right.
7:12
He hates when I'm right.
7:13
But we're both often right about the things that we're respectively working on.
7:19
And that balance is fun and also frustrating.
7:22
I'm pretty sure I've only probably talked to him one-on-one
7:27
for maybe about I want to say 15 minutes.
7:30
Been here for two years because he's just so busy just back and forth.
7:34
It's kind of like hide-and-seek.
7:35
I always need to find him.
7:37
On the car ride to or from somewhere is when we can actually talk about whatever.
7:43
So that's when you actually get to know him as a person.
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Whereas when we're all at work,
7:48
there's really
7:48
time for nothing else but working.
7:51
Throughout the years,
7:52
I kind of saw Linus as like this crazy maniac
7:55
and I was just trying to help him do whatever it was he was trying to achieve.
7:59
But recently because I've taken on managerial roles,
8:04
he's more of a teacher than before.
8:07
And I don't want to turn into him,
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but I'd like to steal some of his skills.
8:14
It's a lot more structured here than I think a lot of people would assume.
8:17
Compared to the beginning,
8:18
things are a lot more corporate.
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It seems like we're a lot less mobile or agile to just change directions.
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There's intense meetings and there's deep statistical analysis.
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All this kind of stuff,
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which doesn't make it feel as like fun.
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It's actually really refreshing to have a working relationship with somebody who's,
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well,
8:43
the CEO of the company.
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But,
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you know,
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we're working together side by side.
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He understands.
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He understands the value of spending good money on employees and equipment
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so that the product that we make,
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which is videos in this case,
9:00
is good.
9:01
$138,000 US dollars for two red cameras and the bulls**t accessories that they make you buy.
9:09
$60,000 in hard drives to store all this crap on.
9:13
Another $20,000 in NVMe SSDs so that all of our editors can edit red footage all the time.
9:18
JARED in the comments and comments.
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You know,
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he cares,
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you know,
9:24
he cares about all of us that work here.
9:25
He cares about you guys watching
9:28
and he's just he's just a loving father.
9:32
I don't know.
9:33
I don't I mean he says he's not going to watch it.
9:35
That's bulls**t.
9:36
Everyone knows that Linus is going to watch this and then he's going to come around be like,
9:40
so um.
9:42
Heard you think I say it's fine all the time when I'm mad.
9:47
I've always felt that a leader should ride a horse
9:50
and
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I've never seen him on horseback.
9:54
So I guess if I were gonna say one thing
9:57
that Linus could do to improve himself as a leader
10:00
in my eyes, is I'd like to see him on a horse more.
10:04
It would make me feel a lot more at ease.
10:23
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10:56
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10:59
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11:01
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