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.
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.
> 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.
> [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.
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?
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 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.
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.
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.
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....
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?
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.
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.
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.
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).
[+] [-] Spoom|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] biztos|3 years ago|reply
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).
[+] [-] epicureanideal|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] rjtavares|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] briffle|3 years ago|reply
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?
Or the ever infamous https://archive.ph/dUJNs
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.
[+] [-] mananaysiempre|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] maximinus_thrax|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] PragmaticPulp|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] tootie|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] choppaface|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] throwawaysleep|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] mytailorisrich|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mc32|3 years ago|reply
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).
[+] [-] gitfan86|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Existenceblinks|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] clownshoez|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] daniel-cussen|3 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] frellus|3 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] OnlineGladiator|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] crmd|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] danwee|3 years ago|reply
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.
And a long etc.
[+] [-] dogman144|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] foobiekr|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] dogleash|3 years ago|reply
Cynicism is just self preservation on topics like this. Most people can’t afford the risk of behaving otherwise.
[+] [-] bwestergard|3 years ago|reply
https://inthesetimes.com/article/human-resources-me-too-sexu...
[+] [-] t43562|3 years ago|reply
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....
[+] [-] aeschinder|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] abalashov|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] civilized|3 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] throwaway98797|3 years ago|reply
legal, accounting, finance, the lower people in those orgs are best helpful drones, at worst agents of petty chaos
[+] [-] DwnVoteHoneyPot|3 years ago|reply
HR is not on the employee's side and not even on the employer's side. They are on HR's side.
[+] [-] moonlighter|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ChrisMarshallNY|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] hardware2win|3 years ago|reply
All hr stuff that ive been involved in was getting hired, questions about taxes, days off calculations and health provider related stuff
Like... what happened to you?
[+] [-] kayodelycaon|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] jacobsenscott|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vlod|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ejb999|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] watwut|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] zelon88|3 years ago|reply
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!"
That really put HR into perspective for me.
[+] [-] SCLeo|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] seneca|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] garmain|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] nibbleshifter|3 years ago|reply
I interact with HR only during the reviews, and periodically to ask for clarification about a benefit or to update my address or something.
[+] [-] andix|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] stevenkovar|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] 5cott0|3 years ago|reply
I don't know about this one, HR (or the lack thereof) in silicon valley has a pretty strong track record of evil.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/25/technology/google-sexual-...
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/18/technology/zenefits-scand...
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-02-27/uber-like...
[+] [-] toughsuck|3 years ago|reply
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).
[+] [-] darth_avocado|3 years ago|reply
Because it costs $700/hour
[+] [-] knorker|3 years ago|reply
:-)