This has always troubled me as well, and have thought if it's possible that (a potentially well meaning) company (maybe Google in the early days?) Could employ a counsel alongside HR who is explicitly and legally required to have the employee's interest at heart? So if you have genuine worries that HR might not help you, you can go to them?
HR is not your friend, and other things I think you should know
181–190 of 471 posts
Re: HR is not your friend, and other things I think you should know
#182Earlier 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…
Oh yeh for sure. I've had an HR women on the phone with me crying because she's so disturbed ny what happened but she had to pretend like she wasn't infront of my boss. She even told me 1:1 the man who refused to let me speak also refused to speak to her it was beneath him and he had another male deliver the message to her to fire me.
In the end she was useless to me and powerless and had as much power ad a caged parrot.
If they are not evil they are simply in control of determining nothing and just a euphemistic liaison for corporate abuse.
I have many war stories from companies like these. Never sign the paperwork right away. I was once given 23minutes to sign a severence agreement and found out later they violated state law: 21 days plus a 7 day walk back, and broke federal law by saying I couldn't have cobra health insurance if I didn't promise to shut up.
Typically a shut up you little bitch document also known as a separation agreement holds severence pay hostage, not healthcare. They also fired me days before I vested my equity and didn't tell me why. In my state you can fire anyone for any reason. They don't have to tell you why. Yeh it's really messed up.
Corporations are like small abusive dictatorships. Just try to find a decent one with good work who is successful enough to be focused on good engineering or whatever it is you do they don't need to bully and tear people down to protect themselves and get by in life.
Re: HR is not your friend, and other things I think you should know
#183Many 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 recent observations my co-founders and I also made are that companies are basically authoritarian regimes. This is probably necessary during the startup phase, but perhaps less so as the company matures.
Is there a precedent for moving from dictatorship/authoritarianism to democracy for company governance as it grows? One movement that shows up on the radar are zebras (vs. unicorns).
An analogy for this comes from the founding fathers of the USA. Washington had a lot of power as effectively the "CEO" of America, but gave up his power after 2 terms and further encouraged democratic governance and peaceful transfer of power.
Re: HR is not your friend, and other things I think you should know
#184Many 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…
What I wonder: is a well run feudal system more successful business wise than a democracy? A democracy sounds nice but I have experienced that it slows down a business because everybody wants to participate and speak their mind. No decision is accepted but constantly challenged. Progress is slowed down. Maybe we just did “the wrong way”. But still.
On the other hand the most successful company on this planet Apple is clearly not run as a democracy. So, I really wonder if a hierarchical system works better if you want to have a successful business.
Re: HR is not your friend, and other things I think you should know
#185Re: HR is not your friend, and other things I think you should know
#186I get the impression this author is dancing around some particular bad experiences they’ve had, which is the real subject of this post. Without understanding those details it’s hard to get where this comes from. There’s certainly a lot of unspoken expectations of what HR is. I’ve worked with HR in many capacities, and find them to be supportive and helpful of both employees and managers. However, what you will not fi…
Can't help but read all of Rachel's posts through a Facebook engineering filter. And, with this post, once you've been on the opposing side of HR, you understand and appreciate her posts. Everyone expects HR to follow the law but in practice you can see this is applied selectively at many companies.
She quit a while back if I recall from some of her posts about it a few years ago. Additionally this isn't the first time she's had issues at a company and left (if you read further back). That being said, it is still useful knowledge, but probably could be taken with a grain of salt.
Re: HR is not your friend, and other things I think you should know
#187Many 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.
Indeed. I would say though that while you are contrasting, the parent was comparing. It's a very good analogy for the political dynamic within a company.
Re: HR is not your friend, and other things I think you should know
#188Earlier 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 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 accordi…
Sure that's an entertaining outlier anecdote.
I think it's better than the current state of things which is: if the company is wrong and covering it up requires some disadvantage to you vs doing the right thing. 100% of these times you are screwed as an employee.
It also wouldn't be a witch hunt anymore than current HR investigations. Just performed by an objective third party.
Re: HR is not your friend, and other things I think you should know
#189Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 li…
> frequent wars
The vast majority of wars in the Middle Ages would be considered mere skirmishes by modern standards.
Re: HR is not your friend, and other things I think you should know
#190Many 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…
The crux of this hinges around (perceived) "ownership" of the HR service.
It needs to be jointly owned by both the employer and the employee for there to be any chance of an equitable balance between conflicting interests of the company who's paying the bill and the company who's providing HR services, with that of the employee, as outlined in some of the other responses you've received.
Based on the inherent complexity of the above, I think the simplest model would be where an employee is also the employer, ie. ownership of the company by the employee.
This allows for the greater good, the future of the whole company, against the rights of the employee to be balanced within the company.
There are plenty of examples of companies owned by their employees.