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HR is not your friend, and other things I think you should know

rachelbythebay.com

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Re: HR is not your friend, and other things I think you should know

#161

Post by r00fus »

projectileboy wrote: post #75
MattGaiser wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

My family migrated to different employer healthcare with zero changes on the provider side other than premium cost.

Perhaps we’re lucky or the system is already monopsonized in our area. However, sometimes you can also get the same network at your new employer (e.g. Kaiser or other HMOs).

That said it’d be a lot better with single payer and the largest risk-pool of an entire country.

Re: HR is not your friend, and other things I think you should know

#162

Post by pjmlp »

slaymaker1907 wrote: post #36
umvi wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are we talking about work or life? Sure, private companies aren't democracies, but why should they be? Democracies are extremely inefficient. Imagine if Linux or Python projects were run as democracies and not lead by BDFLs? I can't imagine them being nearly as effective because democratic processes to get new features would always be gridlocked. Benevolent dictators are 10x, maybe even 100x more efficient than democ…

OTOH, look at how successful Rust has been with its extremely democratic RFC system for new features.

Success in one domain, doesn't guarantee long term success.

Rust still needs to win a spot on major OS developer SDKs, industry standards for HPC, GPGPUs, embedded certifications.

Re: HR is not your friend, and other things I think you should know

#163

Post by WarOnPrivacy »

projectileboy wrote: post #75
MattGaiser wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

> Until the ACA, you were 100% trapped

It is unclear how premiums that exceed income along with deductibles that exceed rent are a freeing experience.

Re: HR is not your friend, and other things I think you should know

#164

Post by r00fus »

MattGaiser wrote: post #33
jiggawatts wrote: post #14

Many 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.

You can move countries too. It’s meant to be difficult for most (easier for the elite).

Re: HR is not your friend, and other things I think you should know

#165

Post by ibudiallo »

I've been talking with companies that are somewhat small but receptive to the idea of employee protection. Unions is often the subject but the damaged done to their reputation in the U.S. is irreversible. No highly paid professional wants to even talk about it.

With unions, an employee being treated unfairly has a place to complain. A place that will actually listen and side with her instead of the corporation. But non-union employees often think that HR is the exact equivalent. Unfortunately they almost always learned the hard way (me included).

If we want to make any dent in the system, HR is the place we want to reform.

The idea that I have started proposing is of a public HR. An hr department that reports back to the state government. The government may not be perfect, but it has a better record when it comes to employee protection.

Edit: previous discussion for more context https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25795851

Re: HR is not your friend, and other things I think you should know

#166

Post by ghevshoo »

hypervisorxxx wrote: post #139
jiggawatts wrote: post #14

Many 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…

My friend and I (both females) one the CEO of a tech company and me a Staff Engineer, have talked about how to do HR right and we came up with an idea but havnt done anything with it. Since HR is clearly biased towards the companies and this has proven to cause a lot of problems, they will never side with you over the company if the company is indeed wrong. HR should ideally be an independent third party and all issu…

I was fired once in one of the worst ways possible. It came as a total surprise.

My boss and my boss’s boss booked a meeting with me at 17:00 in an external meeting room. My boss’s boss did the actual firing. My direct boss just sat there like a sad puppy.

They handed me a piece of paper and I signed it. I was still in shock. I was escorted to my desk to collect my things and then taken to the head of HR for my “exit interview”.

I told her the whole story and she actually seemed shocked herself. I think I spent over an hour with her, holding back tears, explaining “I wasn’t even told what I did wrong. What am I supposed to do now?”

She told me that she thought what the company was wrong. It didn’t change anything but it meant something at least, considering the state I was in.

I noticed from her LinkedIn that she left the company a couple of months later as well.

Re: HR is not your friend, and other things I think you should know

#167

Post by cercatrova »

xg15 wrote: post #156
roenxi wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Er, nope. Or at least you cannot call this system a democracy of 50% if all decisions are done in a feudal system or are done to appease the lord.

A corporation is not a democracy though, and no one is calling it that. Everyone knows this acutely because they know they have a boss to appease. In contrast, in a government, there's really no "boss" to appease, we choose the leaders.

Re: HR is not your friend, and other things I think you should know

#168

Post by thayne »

MattGaiser wrote: post #33
jiggawatts wrote: post #14

Many 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.

> Unlike the serf, I can go find another Lord. I can pit the lords against each other for a better deal.

For many people that isn't really true. And even if you are in a high-demand profession, and have the necessary negotiations skills, moving between jobs has a pretty high transaction cost.

Re: HR is not your friend, and other things I think you should know

#169

Post by number6 »

ardy42 wrote: post #135
solveit wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any different group with a semi-competent lord will absolutely destroy you and take your resources. You'll soon send around resumes begging for a lord to take you.

>> What if we tried to make it so there were no lords? Just a thought. > Any different group with a semi-competent lord will absolutely destroy you and take your resources. You'll soon send around resumes begging for a lord to take you. Not really. IIRC, in the French Revolutionary Wars, French troops were more effective because they were better motivated than those who were fighting for some lord. It's probably nece…

Clearly it's a nice analogy. So there is a need for leadership. There are good leaders and bad (call em leaders or lords) but there is always a hierarchy. Let say there where no hierarchy by rank, there would still be a hierarchy in competence. It may shift as situations shift. Given that. But if someone is a competent leader he will succeed dominating evey hierarchy. That's what leadership leads up to: being a efficient and hopeful a competent leader. So even if you are in a group of mercenaries you will and want to have a leader who makes a call in critical moments. Even if you vote who the leader might be you will choose the one who makes the best decision (could be yourself) or even persuades you into believing that the decisions he made are good.

On this grounding all the other systems emerge like nepotism, bad leadership, fall guys... and HR

Re: HR is not your friend, and other things I think you should know

#170

Post by coldtea »

milesskorpen wrote: post #120
coldtea wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> With the major difference that these days a lot of people get to choose their employers. That was true for many in the feudal times too, they could shop around and pledge their allegiance to one or another feudal lord, and even be given a plot of land to cultivate (as long as the lord got their share of the results). If anything, the feudal lords left them even more to their own devices, and demanded even less of t…

I can't tell if you're trying to be serious here. It was in no way a good life to be a serf. Life was literally nasty, brutish, and short - even putting aside armed conflict and external dangers. Lords would extract what they could. A huge part of life for serfs was figuring out how to survive without producing an easily-extractable surplus (because of it could be extracted, it usually would be extracted).

>It was in no way a good life to be a serf. Life was literally nasty, brutish, and short - even putting aside armed conflict and external dangers.

That's the "old wives tale" version.

Life wasn't particularly nasty or brutish, modern scholarship has re-evaluated the Middle Ages, and the "short" part was similar to 19th century levels due to infant mortality (and otherwise similar to 19-century standards), and has little to do with serfdom per se, and all to do with lack of 2-3 things we take for granted (running water, sewage systems, understanding of microbes, etc.).

Heck, even their vacation time was better: https://www.reuters.com/article/idIN2854000020130829

>Lords would extract what they could

For most of history, there was a certain standard. Lords didn't take "all they could", but closer to 10% or so. If they got too greedy the people could align with another lord, and that would mean trouble. Medieval history has lots of such examples.

>even putting aside armed conflict and external dangers.

Which I already covered:

"If it wasn't for the lack of technology and modern conveniences and frequent wars and dangers from outside, it would be a pretty good lifestyle..."

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