Having friends in HR is fine, but HR is not your friend

You’d think so, but (as you go on to mention) all too often that interest is mediated through some proxy metric such as legal or publicity risk, which can entail a reaction contrary to your interest: e.g. legal risk might reasonably be thought proportional to your legal budget, which is related to your position in the company, so low-level employees get ignored; or if it’s easy for everybody to get publicity, maybe suspects get fired no matter how slim the evidence (the company is free not to do business, including employment, with whomever they want!), making real claims look less legitimate because a few fake ones are widely known; or legal and publicity risks get mitigated by paying everyone involved to shut up rather than solving the problem; etc.

So far it doesn’t look like proxy metrics imposed by government or popular opinion work all that well.

> The continuing ambiguity of compliance standards led management writers to advocate permanent antidiscrimination offices to track legal shifts. Because the courts were so fickle, Marino (1980, p. 25) advised executives to adopt the “Good-Faith-Effort Strategy,” the heart of which was a special office designed to signal that the employer was making every effort to figure out how to comply. In a Harvard Business Review article, Antonia Chayes (1974, p. 81) noted that “vigorous enforcement” had brought “serious top management attention to antidiscrimination legislation....Now the penalties imposed under employment discrimination laws are seen as posing a severe financial threat.” She advised executives to set up EEO and AA programs that could prevent lawsuits. Meanwhile, compensation of upper managers was being tied to affirmative action performance, and this led them to support dedicated antidiscrimination departments.

this may sound familiar

e.g. I was living in the US and had to go for a business trip to the UK and my company put up in the Ritz Carlton in London (a very fancy and very expensive hotel, especially during new year).

However the HR person thought that having a $50 max total spend for my corporate credit card (for an international trip) was fine. Note the hotel room was probably around $550 per night (times by a week).

Luckily my personal credit card, which had an extremely low cap as I had just moved to the US and had really no credit score, managed to cover it.

Of course no apologies and were blase about it when I spoke to them.

If we behaved like this on our dev teams, we'd all get fired.

It's not much different than forgetting that the oh so helpful real estate agent is there to make a sale and a commission, not to make sure you find the perfect house at the best price.