Earlier quoted context omitted.
How will we convince the lords?
We need to convince the serfs, not the lords. The lords can keep lording alone, it doesn't matter.
The real trick, assuming you succeed, is not becoming a lord yourself.
HR is not your friend, and other things I think you should know
141–150 of 471 posts
Re: HR is not your friend, and other things I think you should know
#142IT is not your friend either. They work for the company, not for you. Legal is not your friend either. They work for the company, not for you. Janitorial staff is not your friend either. They work for the company, not for you. Sales is not your friend either. They work for the company, not for you. Marketing is not your friend either. They work for the company, not for you.
Your co-worker is not your friend either (at first, or may never be).
So true. More often than not, they see you as an obstacle.
Re: HR is not your friend, and other things I think you should know
#143I think the relationships in a corporate environment aren't conducive to bringing out the best in people. If you work in one, the best you can hope for is for your team to be left alone and managed by earnest and diligent engineers that have earned the trust of PMs and POs.
Re: HR is not your friend, and other things I think you should know
#144Many people think that they live in a free democracy. In reality, something like 50% of all working people are employed in a strict hierarchical organisation that is essentially feudal in its nature. Most employees are the equivalent of serfs, overseen by lords, with a king in charge. The common employees don't get a vote. Their managers are not elected. They don't get a say in policy. The managers in turn form a str…
If melodrama was a comment.
Re: HR is not your friend, and other things I think you should know
#145Here's another thing to note: At least a few people here have probably heard the words "culture fit" uttered when a decision is being made to bring a new employee onboard. That's basically just a socially acceptable way of validating discrimination in hiring (with ageism being a typical example).
Culture fit is more an assessment of how similar the candidate’s current workplace is to yours, than anything about the candidate personally. It’s “unfair” in that it penalizes the candidate for doing what is appropriate in their current environment, without knowing how well they might be able to assimilate and be effective under your norms.
I don't really think many people tie things back to the candidate's current workplace. It just means "Did they seem like a toxic asshole?" at its best and "Did they seem like your sort of person?" when it's worse.
Re: HR is not your friend, and other things I think you should know
#146Many people think that they live in a free democracy. In reality, something like 50% of all working people are employed in a strict hierarchical organisation that is essentially feudal in its nature. Most employees are the equivalent of serfs, overseen by lords, with a king in charge. The common employees don't get a vote. Their managers are not elected. They don't get a say in policy. The managers in turn form a str…
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Re: HR is not your friend, and other things I think you should know
#147Many people think that they live in a free democracy. In reality, something like 50% of all working people are employed in a strict hierarchical organisation that is essentially feudal in its nature. Most employees are the equivalent of serfs, overseen by lords, with a king in charge. The common employees don't get a vote. Their managers are not elected. They don't get a say in policy. The managers in turn form a str…
Unlike the serf, I can go find another Lord. I can pit the lords against each other for a better deal. I can try and become my own lord. HR has a lot fewer tools than the inquisition. Fear of lawsuits reduces their toolkit even further.
While gp is using slightly emotive language, they didn't at any point say that the feudal structure was bad. A feudal structure is pretty effective in a localised setting where most people know most other people and everyone is happy-enough with the person at the pinacle of the status tree.
The major downsides of old-school feudalism were (1) Doesn't really scale to populations of 200k+ and (2) the We Cannot Get Out problem.
Corporate structure solves both those problems pretty neatly.
Re: HR is not your friend, and other things I think you should know
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
Very true. Unless you have a sick family member. Until the ACA, you were 100% trapped. Now, you’re not officially trapped, only trapped in practice, because when you switch health plans, the providers who have been working with your kid for the last few years are no longer in your network, and... you get the picture.
In the 1950s, employee benefits became non-taxable. Prior to that, employees would get health insurance as individuals and their plans would never be tied to a particular employer, kinda like how it currently works in Switzerland. So that one law drove our entire health insurance system to where it is now.
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Re: HR is not your friend, and other things I think you should know
#149Do not confuse a particularly nasty organizational culture with how HR operates. The HR community tends to look sideways to such organizations while seeking to become (and succeeding) a strategic partner rather than a paper-pusher or a “mall cop”. There are also fundamental differences between how HR operates in US and the rest of the world. Please do not generalize.
Re: HR is not your friend, and other things I think you should know
#150Earlier quoted context omitted.
Very true. Unless you have a sick family member. Until the ACA, you were 100% trapped. Now, you’re not officially trapped, only trapped in practice, because when you switch health plans, the providers who have been working with your kid for the last few years are no longer in your network, and... you get the picture.
In the 1950s, employee benefits became non-taxable. Prior to that, employees would get health insurance as individuals and their plans would never be tied to a particular employer, kinda like how it currently works in Switzerland. So that one law drove our entire health insurance system to where it is now.
It actually started due to WWII.
> Once America became embroiled in World War II, there was great concern that rampant inflation would threaten America's military effort and undermine its domestic economy. The concern was valid, as Americans had witnessed what inflation had done to war-torn Germany, devastating its economy and giving rise to Hitler's regime.
> To combat inflation, the 1942 Stabilization Act was passed. Designed to limit employers' freedom to raise wages and thus to compete on the basis of pay for scarce workers, the actual result of the act was that employers began to offer health benefits as incentives instead.
> Suddenly, employers were in the health insurance business. Because health benefits could be considered part of compensation but did not count as income, workers did not have to pay income tax or payroll taxes on those benefits. [0]
You can also read about this in a 2017 NY Times article [1]
[0] https://www.griffinbenefits.com/blog/history-of-employer-spo...
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20210109190532/https://www.nytim...