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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

#171

Post by hypervisorxxx »

david38 wrote: post #151
hypervisorxxx wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That’s what arbitration is supposed to be. Independent. Yet, it’s not. If you don’t side with the org that butters your bread, you lose the contract.

Yeh bit arbitration is something that has to be escalated to, and something one employee is not well versed or capable of paying the fees for in relation to the company. I wouldn't say arbitration is the equivalent of my idea which is access to external legal help by default with a fair assessment.

There are definitely metrics by which these parties could be ranked but sure there would be issues with gaming these metrics. For example if there as a legal requirement to accurately report across many companies how many times during an internal issue the person not in the superior position was fired vs the superior despite reporting something like sexual assault or racism or something like this, and the company says 100% of the time we agreed the superior did nothing wrong and 75% of the time the complainant magically failed their performance review and is no longer with the company within 6months of this.

Well that is a pretty bad metric.

There are definitely ways to report metrics anonymously and the results and legally can inquire if they reported the outcome accurately.

Carts is stating to do this with money. They are reporting how much money women and minorities have in equity vs white males, and eventually will break it down by position which means yeh if most women work in HR and I'm a senior engineer yeh probs women will have less equity, but next yr they will expand and show things like all staff level software developers, this is the breakdown of men vs women equity in tech companies....

That's a number I would love to see. And it would say alot.

So there are ways to make this better even if it's not an easy fix. Requiring companies to provide healthcare and 401k plans did not happen overnight Im sure, but noone would take a company seriously without these benefits for long.

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

#172

Post by gonehome »

aaron-santos wrote: post #125
gonehome wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s been tried - mostly leads to disaster, see: animal farm. Hierarchy can work well, particularly for growing companies and making decisions. It obviously has problems as a form of government, but the incentive structure of capitalism is a good one for work. Even in democratic governments with elections you still have a decision hierarchy somewhere (hopefully just with some checks on their power)

> incentive structure of capitalism is a good one for work. The inventive structure of capitalism is good for capitalists. Why would they make it any other way?

Growth (when controlled for environment destruction and human rights) leads to helping the most people the fastest: https://press.stripe.com/#stubborn-attachments

You get that from proper incentives. Capitalism is mostly about creating an environment where people can leverage those incentives as easily as possible.

There's a deep irony that the system set up based on incentivizing and rewarding growth (and occasionally greed) has helped raise millions out of poverty while the systems based on altruism have led to the deaths of millions and massive amounts of suffering.

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

#173

Post by thayne »

tehjoker wrote: post #63
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.

What if we tried to make it so there were no lords? Just a thought.

You mean like in a co-op (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative)?

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

#174

Post by _Microft »

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.

This is more a problem of the US american healthcare system than one of the nature of the employer-employee relationship.

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

#175

Post by madhadron »

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.

In Western Europe, serfdom was the exception. It's more of a Russian notion. Commoners in most of feudal Europe had an explicit "right of departure."

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

#176

Post by scaramanga »

bww wrote: post #93
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…

A less dramatic way to put this might be: the person who is paying the bill is the person who gets to decide. In a large company this may be some manager who controls the budget your compensation comes out of. If you’re an independent contractor this is your client. If you’re hiring a person to paint your apartment, this is you. Arguably, this is as it should be. Taken to its logical conclusion the alternative would…

> Taken to its logical conclusion the alternative would mean that nobody is entitled to make a decision about anything without taking a referendum on the matter.

I think a much more generous reading would be that taken to it's natural conclusion this would mean that leaders in the workplace would govern more by consent and not by fiat based on their ability to wield economic power within the corporate structure as lever to coerce workers in to faithfully executing their commands no matter how ridiculous or counter-productive.

Corporations are constituted entirely by laws which evolve under democratic processes and those laws have already been used to limit, structure, and shape the power that corporate managers hold. They cannot defraud investors, they cannot imprison or lash their employees and so on. So is it really unimaginable that there might be some kind of democratic legal reform that would place other limits on their powers without requiring death by a million referenda? I don't think so.

In fact, I think there's probably every reason to believe that, if anything, shareholders would be even better served by preventing executives and middle management from building fiefdoms loyal to them personally which are often not really in-line with the goals of the institution.

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

#177

Post by dannyw »

montenegrohugo wrote: post #23
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…

I would very much recommend Private Government by Elizabeth Anderson (specifically, chapter 2). It's a relatively short read, and very relevant to your comment. Personally, I found the book quite enlightening, it gives a very different perspective to the jobs landscape than the one we usually have. An uncomfortable perspective, but one I feel one that is much more accurate.

Just read. Great chapter. Highly recommend.

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

#178

Post by closeparen »

caturopath wrote: post #145
closeparen wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In “tell me about a time...” questions, the interviewer has some idea of how he would expect his coworker or report to handle such a situation. That idea is culture. The candidate’s response doesn’t have to be “toxic asshole” to be very different, and therefore a culture fit concern.

I have seen candidates rejected for telling stories where they were too cooperative with coworkers they knew to be wrong. Some interviewers in technical rounds will second guess the candidate on correct decisions to see if they stand their ground.

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

#179

Post by mizzao »

ghevshoo wrote: post #166
hypervisorxxx wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Sigh. I'm so sorry you had to deal with that.

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

#180

Post by kevin_nisbet »

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 think it's an interesting idea.

Although, it does remind me of reading about the rush to judgment that killed Nortel. While not totally related, the inciting incident is something along the lines of something appeared a little weird in a financial statement. To avoid even a perception of impropriety, nortel hired a top outside firm to investigate whether there was anything wrong.

The resulting investigation according to the author led to a chain of events and witch hunt that led to the downfall of Nortel and needless criminal prosecution of executives.

Anyways, probably not so much a comment on the idea itself, but more just a thought on possible outcomes when the process goes wrong, whether internal or external.

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