51–60 of 235 posts
Reminds me of the scene in Social Network movie where Eduardo Saverin says "I thought you were my lawyers". HR is not on the employee's side and not even on the employer's side. They are on HR's side.
Yeah... if they were always "representing the best interests of the company", at least they'd be predictable and for the most part I can deal with predictable. What they're usually representing is something else entirely.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you're hiring a top law firm. Plenty of lawyers can be had for $100/hour and are well qualified to review employment terms.
If you’re in any big city, you’re not going to get more than a “consultation” of half an hour for $100. Most of the answers you’ll get in that meeting are the ones you can find by a quick Google search, anything more and it will cost you a lot more. The only cheap option, if you’re lucky, is the local bar association usually does pro bono office hours that you could possibly sign up for and get in. Those don’t work f…
Just because you live in a Big City doesn't mean you need to pay Big City "Power Firm" rates for basic contract advice and consultations.
In those situations you're not meeting with partners anyway - you're getting assigned to a junior associate at best. Often, the paralegals end up doing all the grunt work anyway... and if you're not careful you'll pay them as-if a senior partner dedicated their entire day to your basic mundane situation.
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…
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…
Managers aren’t your friend either.
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 th…
> 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 t…
People are gonna be people.
I dont understand those bad experiences with HR here 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?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 wha…
Again, I understand why most people think this way, and I'm not going to call you naive - just cynical. From my experience (not all of it, but a bunch of it) -- HR has been the balancing force against bad management and even CEOs because, like the lawyers, there're there to protect the company. I've not been in a room where the CEO is sitting there telling the lawyers and HR how to abuse employees -- sorry. Likewise,…
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 th…
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.
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?
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 everythi…
It may have been just a case of everyone doing whatever tasks are needed, but I gave the engineering director an earful afterward.