HR represents the company. Where your goals and the company's aligns, they can be helpful. Where they diverge, perhaps less so.
I think a lot of these sorts of articles discount the idea that your goals and the company's will frequently align. For example, if you're being harassed, it's very often in the company's interest to stop that happening. It will cause you and perhaps more people to quit if they don't, and there might be legal risk. If you're productive and impactful, it's often in their interest to help you with career goals.
Things get muddy when you e.g. have a problem with your manager, or folks above you. Then HR has to determine which side to back based on what they feel is most helpful to the company's goals, or what is less risky. But even then, consider that they might want to avoid bad press, lawsuits, etc. If the situation is bad for you, it could be bad for the company too, but it's worth thinking about deeply before going to HR.
That's been my experience too -- after all, HR people are also just trying to do their jobs as well as they can, and if you need something they perceive as their job to provide, they're usually helpful.
But it's important to remember that "representing the company" absolutely can include unethical behavior like stonewalling employees, lying on management's behalf, and slow-walking your requests until they finally time out (by design).
Having experienced that in a big-company context, I would suggest people be very careful and have a Plan B for any HR interaction, especially in time of layoffs. While you're getting hired and set up then HR is probably on your side, to a reasonable approximation, and when they're not your manager will help. After that, never assume they're on your side, or on your manager's side -- HR will absolutely go behind the back of a manager too on behalf of "the Company" (i.e. higher managers).
> HR represents the company. Where your goals and the company's aligns
HR very often does not even work in the interests of the company. Instead, it works in the interest of the HR employees' own political beliefs, which they then cloak in the language of doing what's right for the company, and connect no matter how loosely to any laws, regulations, etc. that they can use to justify imposing the beliefs they wanted to impose anyway.
Pet projects by any department that aren't in the interests of the company should be discouraged.
Especially by HR, because unlike an engineering pet project that may waste some time, pet projects by HR can significantly impact the quality of life of every employee at the company, cause people not to join the company or quit the company, and so on.
Dysfunctional HR (which is almost all HR) is just about as bad as having a thieving dishonest CFO or a clueless visionless CEO, in terms of its impact on company prospects.
In comparison, a designer who does their work ever so slightly better than is actually going to have business value, or an engineer who puts 10% of their time into some project that they incorrectly think will help the company, or who chooses the 2nd best tool instead of the 1st best tool because the 2nd best one will look better on their resume, these are all much less significant to the company or to their coworkers.
Developer pet projects in the wrong places at tech companies can often negatively impact a very wide portion of the company too. See e.g. companies with internal tooling or security teams can very often force their projects onto others in the company. Needing executive support of course, but so too your your HR newspeak manual if it's actually going to have that kind of impact.
>pet projects by HR can significantly impact the quality of life of every employee at the company, cause people not to join the company or quit the company, and so on
Reminds me of the time I almost rage quit when HR's pet project was to implement a "baking roster" for the purposes of "team building".
Like... No effing way am I spending time baking shit just because you want a supply of freshly baked goods to eat? I'm a software engineer damnit.
At one place, we had a potluck where clearly some people went way above and beyond so we decided that if you don't want to cook, you can just pay USD 20 instead. Those who cooked and baked were clearly spending way over twenty dollars each anyway. That's not a potluck! Anyway, nobody complained anymore after this one change.
A very astute and true point -- however, their unique position and role make HR employees fall into a category I'd argue should be held to a higher standard, precisely because of their outsized potential for impact on the organization.
Pretty true. But that kind of like saying "politicians are going to take bribes, they are just people".
There is the reason why some jobs are treated uniquely, and HR should be one of those jobs, as they have a disproportional amount of power and influence over other people's ability to find employment.
In some countries those special professions are even marked as such in law, for example in Poland there exist a notion of a "public trust profession": "a profession that is a profession of high social importance, requiring appropriate qualifications not only professional and health, but also characterological, i.e. moral and ethical"
I am not particularly keen to enshrine that notion in law, but we should not treat HR so flippantly.
A few years ago I read an article in a business magazine, Forbes or Inc., that surveyed CEOs and found over half of them fear their company's HR department. It seems HR has evolved to be independent of many company's management structure and answerable only to itself.
HR has evolved into political commissars, of the 1918-1924, 1937-1942 variety:
> The political commissar held military rank equaling the unit commander to whom he was attached; moreover, the commissar also had the military authority to countermand the unit-commander's orders at any time.
Depends on the company. In large companies it's very common for the vast majority of HR matters to be delegated to contractors or fresh out of college hires, with no experience managing people, and little authority.
Anecdotally, it seems to me HR employees are akin to "Party Members" / "Card Carrying Members" of a communist country (forgive the analogy). Usually very zealous about the company, usually have drunk the kool-aid, usually believe all of the lore and the promulgated principles / company guidelines. I'd think the head of state for a communist country would fear most the zealous card-carrying member, vs the apathetic proletariat. The zealous card-carrying member is the most likely to become disaffected once the illusion fades.
edit: seems I wasn't the first to make this connection (beaten by 4 minutes)
HR also plays little tricks during hiring to see if candidate accepts lowball offers. They put pressure for signing offer saying that there are couple other equally good candidates for the same position. PS - I had first hand experience. found out too late that there were no other candidates waiting for offer :|
HR going rogue with political nonsense (I can only imagine some libertarian HR telling everyone 'deal with it yourselves!' lol) is not the fault of that HR, it's the fault of incompetent executives. The issue is never one individual, it's a broken system letting a single individual negatively influence it.
It's not entirely the executives' fault. The ambiguities in civil rights law mean that often one has to employ a more politically radical HR department to shield against lawsuits.
Another, more polemical book on the subject would be Christopher Caldwell's Age of Entitlement, which I haven't had a chance to read yet, but from what I understand makes the argument that the 1964 Civil Rights Act caused these issues.
As someone working in HR for the last few years, this is the most correct take. I would add that people working in HR - like any other area - have their own goals, and you should also take that in consideration. Sometimes they don't align at all with the organization.
BTW, it's really funny reading all these takes thinking HR people are evil. Almost as funny as talking to HR that are completely oblivious to the idea that people have about them.
> HR that are completely oblivious to the idea that people have about them.
I can't imagine that's the typical HR pattern. That's certainly not better but I tend to think that they appear oblivious by design, or rather, by education.
Since HR must keep their smiling poker face and their never-promising aleays-optimistic discourse no matter what, they fake this seemingly oblivious character. I guess.
> For example, if you're being harassed, it's very often in the company's interest to stop that happening.
Unless of course, the harraser is a top performer, or VIP in their market. Remeber all that fun with Susan Fowler, an engineer at Uber that went public with her harrasment?
In those cases, like you said, HR protected the interests of the Company, which was in preserving these high performers. And the people who should have been protected, were screwed over.
I always had a problem with that case: so you start to work for one of the most unethical companies out there, a company whose business model is to circumvent regulations, a company that built software whose sole purpose was to deceive auditors.
And then you are shocked, shocked, that there is gambling^W unethical behavior going on?
> [If] you're being harassed, it's very often in the company's interest to stop that happening.
You’d think so, but (as you go on to mention) all too often that interest is mediated through some proxy metric such as legal or publicity risk, which can entail a reaction contrary to your interest: e.g. legal risk might reasonably be thought proportional to your legal budget, which is related to your position in the company, so low-level employees get ignored; or if it’s easy for everybody to get publicity, maybe suspects get fired no matter how slim the evidence (the company is free not to do business, including employment, with whomever they want!), making real claims look less legitimate because a few fake ones are widely known; or legal and publicity risks get mitigated by paying everyone involved to shut up rather than solving the problem; etc.
So far it doesn’t look like proxy metrics imposed by government or popular opinion work all that well.
> For example, if you're being harassed, it's very often in the company's interest to stop that happening.
I agree with this. However, the implementation might not be what the employee would expect. If the victim is moved to another team or fired and the aggressor doesn't face any consequences, the harassment was still stopped, so I guess mission accomplished?
I guess the point I'm trying to make here is that if you're in such a position, reach out to HR only after you have secured your own legal protection and never expect nor trust the company to be on your side.
> I think a lot of these sorts of articles discount the idea that your goals and the company's will frequently align.
I have to remind a lot of people that HR is not your friend, but that doesn't mean HR is your enemy.
A lot of young people are reading "HR is not your friend" articles and assume that they need to go to war with HR. I've had to mentor some people out of weird situations where HR was trying to genuinely help them, but they refused to engage with HR at all due to some anecdote or article they read online.
The common examples is being PIPed. A lot of people panic as soon as they see anything resembling a PIP because the internet tells them it's a formality before they're fired. In contrast, many HR departments have metrics and incentives that make them want to retain employees at any cost, because it looks bad on them if they can't retain people or they're hiring people who underperform and can't be brought up to expected levels of performance. Contrary to what the internet says, a lot of PIP programs can actually result in positive improvements and good long term outcomes, but a lot of people just shut down and resent the company too much to even engage once it happens.
HR is human beings like everyone else in the company. Having friends in HR is definitely a benefit. Same as having friends anywhere else in the org. Ultimately they will tend to protect themselves as will everyone else. When the bottom line dictates something bad has to happen, they likely don't have the juice to stop it. Same goes for everyone outside HR.
‘When HR thinks it’s their job to administrate, you’ve already lost.’
One way to more closely align HR with employees is to focus them on championing a certain set of empowerment values. C-Levels should thus use HR to listen and aggregate employee info, and (importantly) use complimentary soft skills in HR to provide coaching to both high and low performers. This is rare but a feasible vision for a nascent HR org.
The same coaching and development goes for those within HR. Being a BP is really not a long-term career for most. I’ve seen a lot of HR peeps do a rotation for a year or two and then go off to be a founder or transition into very different career tracks. If you treat the HR lower ranks well, that energy can help spread to the rest of the team.
It’s really easy to get this wrong, especially in tech where Founders are poor at soft skills and/or hyper product focused. The OP I feel is a very generous view of the norm. But if you want to form a world-class HR team, there are much higher marks to chase.
> For example, if you're being harassed, it's very often in the company's interest to stop that happening. It will cause you and perhaps more people to quit if they don't, and there might be legal risk.
Depends. You going to sacrifice a secretary or a engineering manager?
You basically need to try and determine what your value is to the org before going to HR.
Related to the other comment about HR having their own goals...
HR may want to get rid of that engineering manager anyway, so they can be replaced with someone that improves their demographics quotas, I mean targets.
I have actually seen such targets in some OKRs for one or more HR teams, somewhere.
I've never heard of a highly effective engineering manager being replaced to meet a demographic target. I'd be surprised if this has ever happened, much less being an actual industry problem. I could see them replacing an engineering manager, for reasons unrelated to the target, and replacing them with someone that helps move them toward their target -- but those are drastically different things.
HR mainly does admin (pay, leaves, etc) and advises management on how to avoid employment-related lawsuits, they also advise on employment market trends (e.g. 'this is what the industry pays for this sort of job so if we want to attract people we need to adjust accordingly').
Some people look at them as ‘impartial judges’. They are not. They have to take the side of the company which will result in more success for the company (not necessarily the manager, or upper manager, but rather the company itself).
Also don't forget to take into account short term vs long term goals. Yes a sexual harassment lawsuit is very bad, but that isn't going to happen immediately. So they may chose the short term solution and try to sweep it under the rug.
You're making the assumption that although you're being harassed the best outcome for you and the company are aligned. This is definitely not always the case, if you are being harassed and it happens to be in the best interest for the company to get rid of you, for whatever reason, guess what happens next?
HR will consider downside risk too. It's usually not the whole story to say that getting rid of you will be simple and easy. You might file a lawsuit. Your colleagues might be demoralized. Other teams might start hearing about the situation and protesting in various ways. The government might get involved. It might lead to bad PR.
I get the whole "HR can be evil" point, but this article could have also been, "Having friends in management is fine, but management is not your friend".
Personally, I'm so sick of the cynicism in general. Can we make points and articles about protecting yourself, as an employee, without resorting to such things?
As a manager in a company, I've both had friends in HR and also had HR been my friend. Need to fire that horrible employee who is demoralizing the team and not being productive? HR is your friend. Need to hire the next best engineer? HR is my friend.
Have I seen horrible, Catbert-like HR managers and people? Of course. In all levels of an organization, people can be horrible. Why round everything up to the cynical points just to get clicks?
> Personally, I'm so sick of the cynicism in general.
Personally, I'm so sick of there not being nearly enough cynicism in general.
I've met cops that aren't total pieces of shit (who all ended up quitting in less than 5 years), but that doesn't mean cops aren't total pieces of shit. If the nature of the job is unethical, you should rightly call it out as such. HR's job is to pretend to be your friend while doing whatever the CEO and the lawyers tell them to do. They're the kind of people who are your friends until suddenly they aren't, and then you realize it was all bullshit to begin with.
You're welcome to disagree. But from my perspective you're naive, and from your perspective I'm cynical.
I should mention I am referring specifically to police in the United States. The short answer is because cops defend cops, including bad cops. People like to say it's just a few bad apples, but it's far more prevalent than that. And even if it were just 1 in 100, the fact that the cops band together to protect a rapist/murderer/whatever shows that they care more about unity than morals.
I realize this answer is lacking, but I've had this argument so many times and it drains hours out of my day to pursue it - because the supporting data is complicated and people are correct to provide counter arguments (and then I have to respond and it goes back and forth for a while). I encourage you to do your own research on statistics regarding police officers in the US. The one everybody likes to cite is how many police officer's beat their wives - 40%. And even this data point is very complicated and requires a lot of nuance and so on.
But since people enjoy stories, here's one egregious example of a sheriff's department abusing their power. Even I think this is exceptionally awful and most police departments aren't this bad, but it's well researched and makes for a good read.
I tend to think there is a huge selection bias problem. The people that I knew in HS who wanted to be cops (and two did), were exactly the people you did NOT want to meet in a dark alleyway. They abused the power their physical strength gave them in HS... what makes you think they'd act differently with legal strength?
And the people that I think are those who most want to help those in need and are compassionate, careful, and would take accountability seriously are those who don't want to do the job.
There is also a kinship/bond that grows, which is hard to break. It's natural. You see it among sports fans, school alumni, console fan boys, company workers, etc... You see things through exceptionally biased glasses. Try to find a sports fan who feels like their team tends to be FAVORED by refs? You won't find them -- they all seem to think the refs are against their team -- every team's fans feel this way. Every team's fans feel like the fight on the field was instigated by the other team.
Given these things, how do you mitigate against them, and construct a police force that is reasonable? I personally think it has to be external oversight, but this hasn't been easy to implement historically.
> People like to say it's just a few bad apples, but it's far more prevalent than that.
Not discounting your point at all, but the best response when someone says this is to point out that the saying is "a few bad apples spoil the bunch". It's very literal- an apple that's going bad releases fumes that cause other apples nearby to spoil. So it's very important to find them and get rid of them before that happens.
Completing the analogy is an exercise left to the reader.
> The short answer is because cops defend cops, including bad cops.
Show me a group that doesn't do this.
In Seattle's 2020 cop-free zone CHOP/CHAZ, the self-appointed "security forces" killed an unarmed 16-year-old. It's all on video, and the statements made by the assailants in the aftermath are heinous. Plenty of people were there to see it, but nobody's talking, and at this point it looks like they'll probably never catch the killers.
I don't excuse or accept bad behavior by cops. But I can't call policing unethical by nature unless you can show me an alternative that is more ethical. Seattle got an experiment in the alternative, and it was not good.
Police abolitionists talk about plans and years. The Seattle police abandoned a neighborhood when not asked and faked reports of armed terrorists.[1]
The 16 year old was Antonio Mays. He drove a car through the occupied park and at a group of protesters. It's all on video? Not only parts of the aftermath? Where?
Thanks for explaining. My experience is mostly with Canadian cops, which have some significant differences from American cops[0]. Though, consequences for cops are still rare[1]. However poorly executed, to me the service they provide is valuable and the cops I've seen at homeless shelters displayed patience.
None of that means the nature of the work is unethical, it just means it’s done poorly. I think the majority of hacker news users world do very poorly in an unpoliced country, even without the police we have now.
Power is corrupting, and police have a de facto shit-ton of real, immediate power over everyone in their vicinity. They have a "martial law bubble" around them that allows them to physically assault you, put you in jail, and upend your whole life with very little effort. You will have no recourse, and they will suffer no consequences. You may file a complaint with the department, and it will be followed up on, poorly, by a fellow officer who is highly motivated to see nothing but another disgruntled loser trying to get petty revenge. The judges don't care and work with the DA and the same officers all the time, and maintain cordial, cooperative relationships with them, all of which is damaged if there is any adversarial action.
It is within this context an average intelligence, perhaps even above-average moral person enters after 6-weeks of training. This person likes watching football and drinking beer. They help their elderly neighbors with the trash. They are a "normal" man who will stand up for himself, physically, in extreme cases. Now give him a gun and a badge and a martial law bubble. How do you think this normal, average man will evolve when he realizes his power? When he sees his friends on the force us it, daily, to get what they want, to make their jobs a little easier? When does he learn to enjoy that feeling of power, for itself, the way it feels to beat someone and put his knee on someone's neck because they talked back to you, and know that no-one can do shit about it? And you can even rationalize it - they shouldn't have been rude, they should know how much power I have and that I'm only human, its really just punishment for being stupid. Plus, the public still loves me and is grateful to me, considering me in high esteem as a moral upstanding citizen - so we must be doing something right!
In my life experience an unsavory character turned law abiding citizen I found that I used to think ill of cops but after I changed, miraculously cops seemed to turn into amazing fantastic people.
So I take all of these "cops are evil" claims with a grain of salt and seek out more context clues to what would initiate an interaction with LEO in the first place.
I have never had a bad encounter with a cop. Yet I still see countless examples of abuse and criminal behavior from police and the lengths that the police forces will go to shield their own.
> So I take all of these "cops are evil" claims with a grain of salt
No need to take any "claim" as fact when there is tons of actual evidence in the form of recordings, law suits and more. I simply do not understand how someone is able to have a positive view of police with the access we have to information. Police are not your friend, they do not serve you and they should not be trusted.
This reads like "the problem disappears as soon as I'm no longer impacted". Just because cops see/treat you differently now doesn't mean they aren't still treating others poorly.
Oh, I don't blame you. If I thought well of cops I'd feel the same way. That positive feeling is to be cherished and protected, because one day it may protect you. Or, you know, you might get unlucky and get swatted by accident, or an ex-wife claims you hit her, or you meet a cop just having a bad day, and you'll have a different experience. That you haven't won the shit lottery doesn't mean it doesn't exist, it just means you're lucky.
And also, consider the impact of being wrong here. Like, if your opinion is taken seriously, then there's nothing wrong, then why? Is it that my basic assumption that power corrupts is wrong? Or do you disagree with the premise that cops aren't held accountable when they abuse their power? In either case, surely you see enough evidence that police, both here and abroad, are constantly struggling with issues of corruption and abuse, sometimes directed at one ethnicity, but always at non-officers.
Consider all the people harassed and locked up for decades over posession of marijuana. Sure laws have change but ethics never did.
The obvious problem I see seems to be that cops exist to lock people up. When locking people up is often an inhumane and ineffective solution to the problem at hand.
Order is a set of subjective social rules that keeps everything in its "correct" place.
Maintaining order often requires not enforcing the law equally. This is the essential moral difficulty of the police. If you have people who appear poor in a rich neighborhood, they are highly likely to attract law enforcement attention at a minimum. Not because they've broken the law, but because they are out of place and "disorderly".
We really really like order, by the way. You can't just do away with the maintenance of order, although a strong argument could be made that we should not enforce it via state-licensed violence.
Again, I understand why most people think this way, and I'm not going to call you naive - just cynical.
From my experience (not all of it, but a bunch of it) -- HR has been the balancing force against bad management and even CEOs because, like the lawyers, there're there to protect the company. I've not been in a room where the CEO is sitting there telling the lawyers and HR how to abuse employees -- sorry.
Likewise, I agree there are plenty of cops who are POS, and there are plenty who are not. You're missing the part of the equation where people treat all cops like POS, and frankly -- if you've watched shows like COPS and seen what some of them deal with -- it's not hard to see why some of them probably become worse over time.
Both sides of the equation needs to change if you want a better world.
The equation is far from balanced. What we need is far more cynicism in order to cause change. We've tried less cynicism and it hasn't worked. It just leads to maintaining the status quo.
>They're the kind of people who are your friends until suddenly they aren't
Happened to me once, I got on the wrong side of some politics and had the awkward termination meeting.
I was civil and cheerful throughout except where I had to be firm and fight my corner: “Pleasure to meet you! Sorry it was under these circumstances, I wish you the best time here!” and I could feel the barely concealed rage emanating from them.
Being in a single party recording jurisdiction was the card up my sleeve, and when I let that slip (after the termination) they looked ready to blow a gasket.
I learned valuable lessons that day about HR, mental health, and how webs can get spun that tangle up idealistic engineers… needless to say, I keep my head down and try to stay out of / avoid starting fights that I don’t stand a chance of winning.
Cynicism tends to go hand in hand with defeatism. I have no problem with cynicism, if you're the rare person willing to take steps to fix or mitigate the problems you are cynical about.
In the more common case, it just leads to giving up. Cynicism is a mistake when it leads to inaction, and inaction is responsible for a lot (arguably most) of the world's problems. I've known people who didn't recycle because they were (maybe still are, we've lost touch) cynical about whether enough other people would do it to matter. The cynicism is getting in the way of action.
No, I don't have a suggestion for what to do about abuse of employees! I know this is not the most helpful, but I'm not the cynic about this. I'm a cynic about other things, but only when I do have a course of action.
It's so nice of you to grant people posthumous permission to have been cynical about Hitler's promises of peace or Nazi ideology in general, provided they were deeply committed to making Nazism actually awesome.
You seem blind to the difference of being lazily cynical about something flawed but ultimately beneficial (and with flaws that you could help address) and seeing through cons dressed up in edifying language about noble causes. Ignore it at your own peril. A lot of very sincere communists met a sticky end under communism as a reward for the sincerity of their beliefs, and very sincerely trying to embody "googly" (etc.) values as espoused by HR may well proof equally terminal (if only to your career). Especially as a slightly aspergery nerd prone to take policy statements at face value.
> inaction is responsible for a lot (arguably most) of the world's problems
Half the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don't mean to do harm; but the harm does not interest them. Or they do not see it, or they justify it because they are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves
Well that was a quick Godwin. If I wanted to, I could make a very strong case that cynicism was a factor that led to the rise of the Third Reich (I'd be paraphrasing a book I read some years ago). I'm not going to make that case because frankly the fact that you jumped right there is indicative that it's not a discussion worth having.
I disagree wholeheartedly. Calling one of the most foundational jobs in human civilization unethical is ridiculous.
We need people who enforce a standard set of rules onto every member of society, and yes, it will always corrupt some who wield that power. We are humans, after all. But does that make the whole idea "unethical"? I presume not.
I get what you’re saying but don’t think the Catbert analogy is apropos here.
What I have seen as a senior tech executive and old person is that young people entering the workforce after around 2015-6 often rely on HR to be a neutral arbiter in workplace conflicts, analogous to parental chaperones or university administrators.
What I believe the author is trying to convey is that this misunderstanding can have disastrous consequences on a young person’s career. HR is not a neutral arbiter between you and the business. They are the business.
>>What I have seen as a senior tech executive and old person is that young people entering the workforce after around 2015-6 often rely on HR to be a neutral arbiter in workplace conflicts, analogous to parental chaperones or university administrators.
Yep - seen it many times when employees (usually younger) say things like "I'm telling HR" or "I'm reporting you to HR", as if it's the same as "I'm telling Mom", and expecting HR to swoop in and rule in their favor on some workplace dispute - thats not there job, never was, never will be.
While you (the complaining employee) are doing that, the back-channel communication to the manager is telling them how they should probably document 'whatever' in writing so that when you eventually get terminated they have a contemporaneous record of all your bad behavior to use against you.
HR is not your friend, they are not supposed to be.
I entered the workforce a bit earlier than 2015 and I would have expected HR to be a neutral arbiter as well. My experience at different employers has proven my expectations to be wrong or at least naive. On every occasion I needed to interact with HR, information (eg. applicable laws) was selectively filtered to make it look like my only option was the one that was beneficial to the business.
YMMV, but for me this is good advice and a welcome reminder.
I think every gen gets to learn this lesson. Not just 2015-16. I have seen it many times in my 30yrs. Newbie gets in a twist over something (usually very justified). HR is then a role of the dice if they will help or just come down on everyone or just the two involved, etc... They usually are the arbiters of policy, that they made, rightly or wrongly.
Because employees are not at the same level as managers/HR. The latter have power over the formers. You like it or not, when horrible people happens to have power, well that's the worst combination possible.
Employees cannot fire managers nor HR (it's in theory possible, but in practices it almost never happens). HR and managers can fire employees (this happens every week).
Employees do not know how much money managers or HR make. Managers and HR know how much money employees make.
Employees have to ask managers and HR for sick leave/vacation. Managers and HR do not have to ask employees for sick leave/vacation.
I have work friends, colleagues, but usually I only ever make 1x friend who I actually trust to speak plainly with and will stay in touch with after work.
For sure, these actual friends at work are great. A mental health buffer, a comrade in arms, a network of two professionals working through companies and careers together.
However, the plainspeak never occurs on company comms platforms. I don’t make that friend until I’m 9 months in and can suss out who’s worth trusting. I always keep some things to myself if that friend is a current coworker vs an ex coworker. That friend is never someone up or down the org chart from me.
It’s not cynical, it’s 10 years of experience surviving and seeing other people blow themselves up because they mistake a workplace for anything but. The more of this you do, the more openings you make to be on the receiving end of workplace politics, and that’s incredibly hard to (a) win at and (b) get out of when it turns south, and it frequently will. And either way, if workplace politics is a concern, you don’t get through it by making friends-friends, you do it by making work friends, building leverage, and aggressively staying out of the way of people who want to pull the social element into work.
The basic problem with the "you guys are too negative" mindset is that abusers are very common. I'm sure { manager, HR }-you-can-be-friends-with exists. I've at least got very solid friendships with multiple management chains (note the plural, as i think it matters), so I know it is _possible_, the problem is it is _rare_.
To quote one of the HR people I worked with, when I said I was having trouble putting someone just diagnosed with brain cancer on a PIP, "What's the big deal? I just fired someone who just had a heart attack."
The people attracted to the HR career path are basically not good people, either because they aren't particularly bright or driven or because the ones that succeed are basically machiavellian.
It’s to the point that discussions are derailed by it with folks who feign knowledge about a topic just offer cynicism. Anything that’s doesn’t work right the empty response is a conspiracy of “oh that’s by design” as if people would otherwise always have things working…
>It’s to the point that discussions are derailed by it with folks who feign knowledge about a topic just offer cynicism. Anything that’s doesn’t work right the empty response is a conspiracy of “oh that’s by design” as if people would otherwise always have things working…
It's a safeguard against trying to fight against things that "shouldn't be like this" and burning yourself out. It's endless in the real world too. The reason cynicism runs so deep is that it's warranted. After a period of time you turn around and ask yourself "if everywhere I go and everything I take a close enough look at makes me think 'this shouldn't be like this!' then what is it that I'm missing???". Eventually when the human operating system that underpins it all comes into view, the cynicism sets in. Sure, it's a lazy-ish answer, but in my experience it's a pretty darn good heuristic as far as heuristics go.
It's always been possible to feign knowledge and wisdom with cynicism, even before public discourse was carried out "online".
It's also always been possible to feign knowledge and wisdom with breathless enthusiasm or optimism. Fakery is fakery.
In general, we are not cynical enough. Humans have been out to take advantage of each other for as long as we have recorded history, and probably for much longer than that. Civilization is maintained in equilibrium between forces that seek to destroy each other, so you can and should assume that those forces exist and are currently and actively attempting to pursue their own gain at your expense. The heart of propaganda is convincing people to act against their own best interests. This is built into the essence of humanity.
HR and management are effectively the same from an employee perspective (with slightly different motives), so the cynicism is equally applicable to you.
> Personally, I'm so sick of the cynicism in general. Can we make points and articles about protecting yourself, as an employee, without resorting to such things?
I don't think this will happen anytime soon for two reasons.
The first is that cynicism always sounds smart. "Don't take the vaccine, big pharma doesn't care at all about your health and just wants to make money." If you assume bad intentions, regardless of if you have any evidence of bad intentions, you sound smart and people will listen to you.
The second is that cynicism is generally negative in tone, and as a result is much more likely to go viral on the internet. No one clicks on or shares articles that say "HR people are paid to protect the company, but they are good people like the rest of us".
> As a manager in a company, I've both had friends in HR and also had HR been my friend. Need to fire that horrible employee who is demoralizing the team and not being productive? HR is your friend. Need to hire the next best engineer? HR is my friend.
That's not a friend, that's a co-worker doing their job. There's a big difference between a friend and someone you get a long with well in a professional setting.
One is enough to make it sux for everybody. And fairly often, the team is assigned people without leader having the say in advance - especially when it comes to people from other teams.
Managers on the other hand may or may not work in your best interests, just like any friend. Meanwhile, HR is literally tasked with protecting the company from me. So I would not lump the two into the same basket.
I've been lucky enough to have experienced managers who see my current position as inherently temporary, and would consider it a personal failure to not help me develop my overall career as best I can. I know not all managers think like this, probably not even most managers, but the point is they are allowed to. HR is not.
Not only is HR incentivized to defend the company over its employees whenever possible, but I think it's a position that attracts psychopaths. Being in HR takes no extraordinary talent whatsoever, yet HR has massive power over the destiny of individuals. They get to decide whether you have a chance at landing a job you want, make your rent next month, whether a coworker who bullies you gets to keep their job, and so forth. There's good HR people out there, but I've seen a substantial number of dumb, ego-tripping, completely unhelpful HR people as well. If you've got nothing going for you and you have an inferiority complex then HR is for you because you can take out your frustration by deleting resumes that use present participle instead of past participle.
The whole concept of a "human resources" department was developed as a response to workers organizing unions to bargain over terms and conditions of employment. Whatever the flaws of some unions, they are ultimately economically dependent on their members, and the officers are elected. HR is accountable only to executives.
Wasn't the precursor "Personnel Departments" which were more administrative? Especially in a pre-computer era with more literal paperwork? It seems like HR evolved out of that to service more "strategic" business needs, which sure, probably included union busting, but also includes many other functions to serve companies in more competitive environments that are dominated by knowledge work.
> The continuing ambiguity of compliance standards led management writers to advocate permanent antidiscrimination offices to track legal shifts. Because the courts were so fickle, Marino (1980, p. 25) advised executives to adopt the “Good-Faith-Effort Strategy,” the heart of which was a special office designed to signal that the employer was making every effort to figure out how to comply. In a Harvard Business Review article, Antonia Chayes (1974, p. 81) noted that “vigorous enforcement” had brought “serious top management attention to antidiscrimination legislation....Now the penalties imposed under employment discrimination laws are seen as posing a severe financial threat.” She advised executives to set up EEO and AA programs that could prevent lawsuits. Meanwhile, compensation of upper managers was being tied to affirmative action performance, and this led them to support dedicated antidiscrimination departments.
You Americans brought us the term "Human Resources" which used to be "Personnel" after all. :-) OK I'm joking!!! I don't really know whose fault it is that we are considered "human things" now instead of "people" but it does beautifully demonstrate the attitude that we are like the office printer or the factory machinery but more finickety.
I think it's being public that screws things up the most - there is no loyalty but to the share price and there's nothing legal that management wouldn't do to make it go up apart from arranging their own golden parachutes. So all your efforts to work extra hard or go to the mattresses or whatever are totally pointless until they result in a raise or a promotion.
A private company might be able to weather some storms and take a longer term view. Loyalty might exist there up to a point.
Anyhow it is just silly to flay yourself, which I did in my youth, for some company which can never be grateful or loyal. If you're going to burn the candle at both ends you need to do it in a place where it's going to count. That might be better to do in a startup or smaller company or private company than in some corporation with a stock price.
......in my humble temporary opinion which I will probably change in the next 20 minutes....
> OK I'm joking!!! I don't really know whose fault it is that we are considered "human things" now instead of "people"
Just looked at the Wikipedia, and turns out Taylor was born on the US. I always assumed he was British. Almost all the fault for creating the idea falls between him and Ford. The fault for spreading it falls on management schools.
I was a manager at a well known .com for several years. HR exists to protect the company from its own employees. That's why you have to sit through mandatory DEI training, sexual harassment training and other indignities. Studies have shown that mandatory training does very, very little to change anyone's mind. It is simply to protect the company in case there is an incident.
As for layoffs, it is always Finance and HR that know about all of the plans before anyone else. HR will try its best to perform layoffs under the guise of "reorganization" of departments or the whole company. This gives them cover to get rid of undesirables, older (read "expensive") employees and other people problems.
Firing people is the hardest thing. It is simplicity itself if you are an executive VP or higher, but below that it takes a ream of paperwork, a performance plan and months-long periods where the employee sabotages work, "quiet quits" and makes things miserable for everyone around them. HR doesn't want to create a scene that might reflect poorly on the company.
I'm super jaded after 30 years in IT so I apologize if this is too negative a response.
Prior to going out on my own at a precociously young age, my time in corporate America (~3.5 years) was fairly brief, and less than half of it spent at companies large enough to have an HR apparatus in any meaningful sense.
I always found their seeming double-agent role confusing and ambiguous in a slightly sinister way, even as they preached that they were there for us workforce people if we needed anything.
The dehumanizing name "Human Resources" says it all, doesn't it?
We're not people. We're not even workers. We're just resources that happen to be members of the human species. Similar to other resources like staplers.
There's no perfect euphemism for what HR does, but something like... I don't know... Workforce Management? Would be a little less awful, I think?
I've noticed this as well. Especially going through layoffs. It's not "people" getting "fired," it's "resources impacted." Oh, it's also not a "layoff," it's a "reduction in force."
I think it's a mistake to put much weight on the name. In companies where that department is called "People Ops" or "The People Team", the fundamental responsibilities to the company are unchanged.
I guess part of the raison d'etre in larger companies is precisely to make humans measurable. And that is necessary to make a company manageable by executives. Although I think in some businesses that kind of work is largely performative.
It's still common among recruiters and staffing companies. Back in the mid-2000s when I was last looking for jobs, it was the bane of my existence to be summoned as a "Linux resource" or something...
Many companies are moving away from calling it that. Let's not pretend it's like that everywhere. I can't recall the last place I worked that actually called it "Human Resources".
Yeah... if they were always "representing the best interests of the company", at least they'd be predictable and for the most part I can deal with predictable. What they're usually representing is something else entirely.
If you talk to HR employees and ask them whether they feel like an employee or rather as "the employer"... based on my own findings most will tell you that they feel like the employer; even though they're just employees too.
> HR exist to represent the interests of the company
In the company I worked for, HR was there to protect the C-Suite. There were two sets of rules: The ones for the executives, and the ones for everyone else.
It was pretty routine for us to get training (lots of training), telling us to avoid specific activities (like, say...f'rinstance, dating subordinates), yet we'd see the executives, doing exactly that, without a peep from HR.
I have a disability. A new HR person was hired and she started introducing policies as if we were a 100,000+ person company, when we had less than 400.
Most of those policies ran head first into ADA. Hard. My manager and I had worked just fine with my limitations prior to these rules. The new HR person wanted to overrule everything and then got pissed when she had to start tracking my time off per hour in a spreadsheet and manually adjust payroll because she didn't know how to enter it in the system properly.
She did some serious gymnastics to get me fired over the protests of several layers of management.
Sounds like all the HR stuff you've been involved with is not threatening to the company (lucky you), so of course they are sweet a pie. Go to them for help with a discrimination complaint or the like (or just google up the thousands of stories) and you'll see "what happened".
When you're reliant on them, every single HR dept I've hard to deal with (across many companies) has been incompetent. It's too the point I have systems in place to cover their inevitable screw up.
e.g. I was living in the US and had to go for a business trip to the UK and my company put up in the Ritz Carlton in London (a very fancy and very expensive hotel, especially during new year).
However the HR person thought that having a $50 max total spend for my corporate credit card (for an international trip) was fine. Note the hotel room was probably around $550 per night (times by a week).
Luckily my personal credit card, which had an extremely low cap as I had just moved to the US and had really no credit score, managed to cover it.
Of course no apologies and were blase about it when I spoke to them.
If we behaved like this on our dev teams, we'd all get fired.
Unless your company is so tiny that the HR person is wearing many hats, the credit limit on your corp credit card is set by the finance team and likely has nothing at all to do with HR.
Although a $50 (!?) limit on a credit card sounds more like somebody at the bank fucked up.
Doesn't really matter. If HR are the employee facing 'front' of the company and do all the work of booking flight, hotels, transport etc then the buck stops with them.
i.e. If one is a tech/product team lead with an external client, you can't blame a developer (below you in the food chain) for screwing up. All screens/functionality has to be verified before the client sees it. If not, you'll more than likely look like an idiot.
I've never worked in a company where HR does flight and hotel bookings. Just how many people work in your company? Or are you using "HR" to refer broadly to everybody working in any type of administrative role?
In my (typical) company, HR sets travel policy but everything else about travel, down to approving expense reports, is outsourced to vendors or other departments.
There are most likely other departments, but HR generally manage all of the trip details and are the front for the employee. i.e. to save the employee wasting a bunch of time talking to X number of depts (that don't return calls etc) to try and get things setup.
i.e. From a costing perspective, you don't want senior people or super busy (and expensive) engineers wasting a bunch of time.
The 'bad experiences' with HR are usually because of some employees not understanding who HR serves - I also have never had a problem with HR; you only deal with HR on your first day and last day for the most part.
It's not much different than forgetting that the oh so helpful real estate agent is there to make a sale and a commission, not to make sure you find the perfect house at the best price.
Our company created HR and the result was surprisingly positive. The hiring process started to be way more organized - they made no decisions, but planned interviews, made sure they are when everyone is available and knows about them.
They were also available to explain labor laws, regulations and process whenever leader/manager needed it. That alone made a lot of stuff more predictable.
I was skeptical at first, but it was definitely an improvement.
Anecdotal HR story: I got hurt at work once and required surgery. I came into work with this information and told my friendly, cheerful HR person the news. They closed the door to their office and began visibly stressing out about the workers comp claim. I wasn't being berated, but I was being questioned on my motive behind going to a hospital instead of the assigned "occupational health specialist" that the company employed.
The HR person literally said, verbatim, "Awww why didn't you go to OUR doctors? You went to a hospital? This is going to cost us a fortune!"
I am not trying to say HR is evil but this line of reasoning makes literally no sense.
Whether someone is just doing the job has absolutely nothing to do with if the job they are doing is evil. "They are just doing their jobs" should never be used to justify anyone's actions. For brevity, I will skip all the war crime analogies that everyone can think of.
I disagree with the "mostly harmless" take in the article.
HR is the group everyone, regardless of where they stand in a company, must be the most careful in dealing with. They are beurocrats and, in modern western companies, are becoming ideological commissars.
One of the strongest suggestions I would make to anyone going into white collar work is to avoid HR as much as possible, and be extremely careful of everything you say to them when you do interact with them. For leaders, be very careful about how you let HR grow. Keep it as small as possible and do not let it get into the business of controlling your culture.
If someone's going to drive company culture, why shouldn't it be HR? They seem well qualified to do so. For example, someone in HR would be in a good position to do the research to figure out if work-from-home improves productivity or employee happiness, and they would also understand the tax and legal implications of a possible work-from-home policy.
> If someone's going to drive company culture, why shouldn't it be HR?
Because HR people are natives of HR culture and only have second hand knowledge of what “engineering culture” or “finance culture” or $WHATEVER culture is, much less what makes a good/healthy/productive engineering or finance or $WHATEVER culture.
I will also add that, while there are a few very talented HR people (and the good ones are freakishly good), most folks in the HR field ended up there rather than sought it out. They are not collectively the most talented or ambitious group of people, and the field often attracts ideologues who sometimes have dysfunctional perceptions of the world we live in.
Culture comes from leadership and leaders. When this doesn’t happen, you get all sorts of organizational issues. HR are not leaders. Culture isn’t productive and clicks per hour research or something you can suss out from forced company fun sessions.
This is a root of an issue in corporate America where management (and it’s offshoots like HR) is considered the mindset, and really it’s about leadership.
Leaders set culture, build companies, grow visions. Managers execute that. Some managers can actually lead. HR supports it. When people hate working at places, it’s always back to a lack of leadership in some way.
It's utterly bizarre how people keep scape goating HR.
It's the typical situation that whenever HR goes out of their way to make "everyone" happy, no one says acknowledges it. But Management can hide behind "HR" and employees love blaming HR, because that is the person they interact with the most.
HR is your business partner. You can be friends, as long as you are able to keep business separate from friendship. And stopping yourself, when the friendship exposes too much that influences the business.
I think business follows some very clear rules, compared to friendship. It’s always about money. The decision is always in the direction that is the cheapest and brings the most profit. Friendship can help there, if some options are equally priced, then the friend may be chosen, because of the friendship.
I think employees have a very powerful position, once they realize that. Replacing someone can cost up to 6 monthly salaries (fees for headhunters, trainings, …). If you find out where the tipping point is, you can negotiate better. It’s also important to highlight your employers benefits if you want something.
In corporations then currency is quite often not just money, but influence and power. A lot of managers decide based on what will give them more power. If you play along, they may give you much more money/benefits.
Cheapest/most profit as the ultimate goal is potentially a cultural thing - long term versus short term benefit might be valued more e.g. in Japan. and less in e.g. the US or the UK.
What you say about the cost of replacing people IS the argument I used for getting one of my team a raise. There's no doubt it's very time consuning and difficult to get suitable new people and well worth the small amount this one wanted.
Now that I'm on the other side of the line I can see that one doesn't want to hire people who are going to fight you all the time or (even worse) fight everyone else and cause trouble. Bad/good as that may be .....
Short or long term profit is a cultural thing, even some companies value the one over the other. There are also companies, that will never pay any employee more then the industry average. Those are factors that need to be considered.
About people who fight, that's often really hard to judge. In some companies this is how change happens, and it's appreciated in the end (or not).
In essence, HR is the buffer between humans and systems. They create the systems that allow humans to do things like work and be compensated for their work, or to work in an environment where they can expect not to be harassed—at baseline. They clean up everyone's mess when the interface between human and system is compromised.
If a system breaks down, it's HR's job to figure out how to handle the errors. Every company's HR will encounter unwinnable situations where all HR can do is remember the "error code" for next time and, if they're lucky, create systems or policies that prevent it from happening again.
Some (very few) companies have more thoughtfully designed systems that enable the HR team to act proactively on behalf of the employees.
And some (most) companies are poorly structured such that the system is constantly breaking and it's HR's job to keep the company's cadence going as best they can.
I'm guessing most people in this thread have experienced more of the latter.
HR as a function will always represent and serve the company. Thinking anything else is foolish.
But building a strong and friendly relationship with your HR partners is universally a good thing and something one should strive for (be at as as people leader or individual contributor).
Honestly this is one of my biggest pet peeves with any “consult a $SPECIALIST” advice.
Yes, if my money and time were endless, this is sound advice.
Tangentially, when I express frustration at police incompetence in knowing the law (I live in the US, and many law enforcement officers are under-trained), a common response is “this shouldn’t be an issue as you can follow up in court and get the charges dismissed, or even sue the city”.
Again, fair suggestion if I have dozens of hours of time on my hand and thousands in lawyer fees to burn.
I tend to work for smaller companies so I've been laid off a few times. I've hired employment lawyers each time. I've paid them approx $2K-$3K each time and have receive much more back.
First, I worked at Company A for 5 years, then was actively recruited to Company B. Company B laid me off after 11 months. The typical severance payment is 1 month for each year of service, so you'd assume I'd only get ~1 month of pay. The lawyer was able to get me 1 month of salary for each of 5 years plus 11 months of service. There is something in the laws* about them actively recruiting, luring me away from Company A that makes Company B need to compensate me for the loss of leaving Company A.
*I'm not a lawyer, but I think it's case law and not statutory laws.
Second, employment lawyer told me when they announce a large layoff, they have everything planned. Including a budget for people who ask for more money. Since HR is dealing with hundreds or thousands of layoffs (eg. Amazon), they don't have time/resources to argue with you. If you ask for more severance, they'll just give it to you (budget already approved), especially if you are represented by a lawyer.
EDIT: Third, I'm mid-career. Lawyer told me at my level, it takes longer to find a job. Why accept a generic package that juniors will get when law* already agrees that it takes me longer to find work. Point of the severance is to bridge me to my next job, I should get more.
If you’re in any big city, you’re not going to get more than a “consultation” of half an hour for $100. Most of the answers you’ll get in that meeting are the ones you can find by a quick Google search, anything more and it will cost you a lot more.
The only cheap option, if you’re lucky, is the local bar association usually does pro bono office hours that you could possibly sign up for and get in. Those don’t work for time sensitive issues like when you have to sign a contract by X date.
You do not need to go sit in some fancy law firm's office to get good legal advice.
Just because you live in a Big City doesn't mean you need to pay Big City "Power Firm" rates for basic contract advice and consultations.
In those situations you're not meeting with partners anyway - you're getting assigned to a junior associate at best. Often, the paralegals end up doing all the grunt work anyway... and if you're not careful you'll pay them as-if a senior partner dedicated their entire day to your basic mundane situation.
Well don't go to a lawyer in a big city? You can easily interact with a lawyer virtually.
Even if all they do is tell you what you could find out in a Google search if you knew what to search, it's going to be more useful for the average person because lawyers have the confidence to interpret legal terminology, contextualize what they are telling you, and recognize what is and is not normal (e.g. notice predatory terms in a contract).
Also commonly-held positions that are false, or not applicable in a certain jurisdiction. Google can be misleading.
This is one of the big advantages of having a good network of friends and family with a wide variety of expertise. I wouldn't necessarily ask my lawyer friends to review a contract for me ... but I won't hesitate to ask if I should ask a lawyer, or about a general principle or clause that seems weird and help inform if I need more specific paid advice.
I agree $700/hr is higher than necessary. But I'm not sure what kind of lawyer you are going to get for $100/hr if you're talking about within the U.S.
I dont know anything about lawyers. Are there cheap city lawyers? Are there expensive small town private practice lawyers? What makes a lawyer's value go up? I'm asking a non rhetorical question, I really dont know
HR can be a blessing to some employees; there have been one occasion at my previous job where an employee was given an increase simply because HR found they had dropped below the 10th percentile in their salary band.
In another situation HR has forced an increase because of a personal rating even though the budget for increases in the department didn't have funding for it (effectively HR forced a budget increase due to the rating of the employee).
Both of these times i've found them to be a welcome and helpful surprise.
That said, it is very true if you're filing a discrimination complaint or otherwise putting the company at risk you're implicitly putting yourself and the person you're accusing into the looking glass, and that could bite you in the butt if HR decides the manager isn't at fault.
Someone once said to me, "HR is there to protect the company from the employees." Always keep that in mind. That's what they're paid for.
For some reason, I also think of the quote [1] from Bleak House,
"Suffer any wrong that can be done you rather than come here!"
In the old days, they were called "Personnel." Now that's too old-fashioned, and pretty soon the name "HR" will be, too, so they'll call it something else.
This gets even trickier for HR employees themselves - their job is to look out for the company, while at the same time they're an employee of the company who needs to look out for their own personal interests.
"HR aren’t evil, they’re just doing a job".
HR people aren't evil, they are just people who have freely decided to apply evil and cynical policies 8h a day 5 days a week on a group of other people.
This comment always stuck with me - does anyone know more of the history ombudsmen, who must've existed prior to the rise of modern HR departments?
> octokatt on Feb 19, 2020 | parent | context | un‑favorite | on: Why Susan Fowler blew the whistle on sexism at Ube...
> why must it be this way
Companies used to have Ombudsman; literally a board member who did nothing but listen to employee complaints and help them e heard. This tended to lead to unions, which reduced company profitability, and was replaced with the current HR model, which is now giving way to out-sourced HR models.
There is the thing most people don't really think of. They all know HR represents the company and are to look after it's interest. But one major thing, HR needs to keep their job too. I had a really good relationship with HR at one company we were _really_ close. But when the company wanted to get rid of me, she did what anyone else would do that needs their job did the super shady stuff they told her to do and got a new job asap. Most people need their jobs. They need to feed their family.
Do not forget this. The nicest, most approachable and apparently friendly HR staffer will happily stuff you down the chute if they are so directed.
Through bitter experience, I treat HR the way I treat the police; they can do good things and they can do bad things, but mostly it's best to avoid their attention altogether and assume that their actions will be for the authorities, always.
HR exists to maximize shareholder value, like every other function. They do things that sound nice in support of this. But don’t ever expect them to take someone’s side out of principle if that hurts shareholder value.
They push for anti-harassment policies because it’s good for shareholders. They normalize compensation because it’s good for shareholders. If they treat people good on the way out, it’s because it’s good for shareholders.
They’re no different than the Finance, Legal or any other department.
So, what are some things I should be doing (documenting?) now, as a happy and well-performing at-will US-based employee, so that I can have legal standing for a better "redundancy package" than what is offered, if I'm terminated, later?
This article kind of stops short and seems to just be saying, "get a lawyer before you sign anything," which I've heard before. How would I know if a lawyer would be able to help improve the offer?
Alternatively:
What case could I make in the "exit interview" or whenever the package is being offered to make a counter-offer and have it considered, without necessarily having to secure legal representation?
I read that many times on HN, like a revelation "HR is not your side". This sounds pretty obvious to me. My interaction with HR has never been more than updating some administrative information or sending them documents they need. And the day they'll fire me, why should I expect any special favour from them? I don't see them more on "my side" than the IRS or my landlord.
I don’t think they’re evil either, but the recent pivot to the insane pursuit of “diversity” and “inclusion” seems to threaten a good working environment.
Required trainings on “pronoun politics” displace what could be trainings in communication, customer service, and professionalism, or even “email etiquette”, all of which our mostly foreign engineering team could really benefit from.
The day I realised HR were (at my employer's) a bunch of liars and manipulating personas it was too late. Since then I am extraordinarily hardline in all my meetings with them. I cannot be sure it is actually working, but you need to be very demanding to get what you deserve (with my employer).
People think the "resource" in human resources means that the team is available as a resource for employees should they need anything. In reality you are the resource they are referring to.
I want to ask a really base level question. And maybe it doesn't relate to this article in particular. Why do I get the vibe that people talk about HR as if it's some sort of clandestine political power center in our society? Or is this is just a recent right wing talking point?
I could maybe see a power struggle between "engineering" and "design" in a company like Apple. Is HR not just a basic managerial function the the CEO can adjust as necessary if something goes wrong?
In a well-run company, HR stays in their lane and executes orders from management.
In all too many companies in the real world, management is a chaotic revolving door of political infighting, and HR has a great deal of power. I've worked in a team where an HR rep attended every personnel-related management meeting, and overruled performance ratings, promotions etc while the VP supposedly running the show played Candy Crush.
Companies in general aren't anyone's friend, in that, ideally, a company is a machine designed to make money within the constraints of law and the ethical rules the leadership decides to follow.
Companies, like nations, have no friends, only interests.
I mean a company is, inherently, a money-making concern, and the ideal company obeys both the law and a code of ethics more restrictive than the law. Even a company that devotes all profits to charity has to end up in the black or else it ceases to exist and can't be a charity anymore.
Yea 20 years of work and this holds very true. Some are obviously better than others about how the manage employee interests vs theirs, best align both tightly as possible, owning equity for me is key to this.
As CTO it always was mine and I invested lots of time for good relationships - E.g. visited them everyday for some minutes. But I might have experienced only good and helpful HR departments which were highly interested in people development. The only time I got real trouble was when the head of HR suggested I lay off half of the department (but even then I could change the number way down with cancelling all freelancer contracts and some investments).
As a C-level executive, HR does represent you. You are the company (in part). If you are on the board, even more so.
For a rank-and-file employee, the interests are divergent. HR represents the company. Even for those who have the ability to hire and fire, HR is only aligned with your interests to the extent that your interests are the interests of the company.
(However, fun fact: at many companies, only the CEO has authority to hire and fire. All such personnel decisions go through an HR-mediated process, and the CEO makes the final call.)
I think a lot of these sorts of articles discount the idea that your goals and the company's will frequently align. For example, if you're being harassed, it's very often in the company's interest to stop that happening. It will cause you and perhaps more people to quit if they don't, and there might be legal risk. If you're productive and impactful, it's often in their interest to help you with career goals.
Things get muddy when you e.g. have a problem with your manager, or folks above you. Then HR has to determine which side to back based on what they feel is most helpful to the company's goals, or what is less risky. But even then, consider that they might want to avoid bad press, lawsuits, etc. If the situation is bad for you, it could be bad for the company too, but it's worth thinking about deeply before going to HR.