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

cdoyle.me

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

#121

Post by Macha »

epicureanideal wrote: post #73
afarrell wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. And Engineers often have pet projects. Marketing often has a slightly odd artistic vision for something. People are gonna be people.

Pet projects by any department that aren't in the interests of the company should be discouraged. Especially by HR, because unlike an engineering pet project that may waste some time, pet projects by HR can significantly impact the quality of life of every employee at the company, cause people not to join the company or quit the company, and so on. Dysfunctional HR (which is almost all HR) is just about as bad as hav…

Developer pet projects in the wrong places at tech companies can often negatively impact a very wide portion of the company too. See e.g. companies with internal tooling or security teams can very often force their projects onto others in the company. Needing executive support of course, but so too your your HR newspeak manual if it's actually going to have that kind of impact.

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

#122

Post by bushbaba »

criley2 wrote: post #77
epicureanideal wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

HR going rogue with political nonsense (I can only imagine some libertarian HR telling everyone 'deal with it yourselves!' lol) is not the fault of that HR, it's the fault of incompetent executives. The issue is never one individual, it's a broken system letting a single individual negatively influence it.

How do you fire the HR exec when HR itself handles the firings.

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

#123

Post by dogman144 »

frellus wrote: post #10

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 have work friends, colleagues, but usually I only ever make 1x friend who I actually trust to speak plainly with and will stay in touch with after work.

For sure, these actual friends at work are great. A mental health buffer, a comrade in arms, a network of two professionals working through companies and careers together.

However, the plainspeak never occurs on company comms platforms. I don’t make that friend until I’m 9 months in and can suss out who’s worth trusting. I always keep some things to myself if that friend is a current coworker vs an ex coworker. That friend is never someone up or down the org chart from me.

It’s not cynical, it’s 10 years of experience surviving and seeing other people blow themselves up because they mistake a workplace for anything but. The more of this you do, the more openings you make to be on the receiving end of workplace politics, and that’s incredibly hard to (a) win at and (b) get out of when it turns south, and it frequently will. And either way, if workplace politics is a concern, you don’t get through it by making friends-friends, you do it by making work friends, building leverage, and aggressively staying out of the way of people who want to pull the social element into work.

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

#124

Post by Parcle »

acover wrote: post #43
OnlineGladiator wrote: post #19

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…

Why is the nature of being a cop unethical? I agree there are abuses of the power but from what I've seen in real life it's important work.

Consider all the people harassed and locked up for decades over posession of marijuana. Sure laws have change but ethics never did.

The obvious problem I see seems to be that cops exist to lock people up. When locking people up is often an inhumane and ineffective solution to the problem at hand.

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

#125

Post by renlo »

Mountain_Skies wrote: post #83
epicureanideal wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

A few years ago I read an article in a business magazine, Forbes or Inc., that surveyed CEOs and found over half of them fear their company's HR department. It seems HR has evolved to be independent of many company's management structure and answerable only to itself.

Anecdotally, it seems to me HR employees are akin to "Party Members" / "Card Carrying Members" of a communist country (forgive the analogy). Usually very zealous about the company, usually have drunk the kool-aid, usually believe all of the lore and the promulgated principles / company guidelines. I'd think the head of state for a communist country would fear most the zealous card-carrying member, vs the apathetic proletariat. The zealous card-carrying member is the most likely to become disaffected once the illusion fades.

edit: seems I wasn't the first to make this connection (beaten by 4 minutes)

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

#126

Post by ravenstine »

teawrecks wrote: post #92
frellus wrote: post #10

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…

> HR aren’t evil, they’re just doing a job Managers on the other hand may or may not work in your best interests, just like any friend. Meanwhile, HR is literally tasked with protecting the company from me. So I would not lump the two into the same basket. I've been lucky enough to have experienced managers who see my current position as inherently temporary, and would consider it a personal failure to not help me de…

Not only is HR incentivized to defend the company over its employees whenever possible, but I think it's a position that attracts psychopaths. Being in HR takes no extraordinary talent whatsoever, yet HR has massive power over the destiny of individuals. They get to decide whether you have a chance at landing a job you want, make your rent next month, whether a coworker who bullies you gets to keep their job, and so forth. There's good HR people out there, but I've seen a substantial number of dumb, ego-tripping, completely unhelpful HR people as well. If you've got nothing going for you and you have an inferiority complex then HR is for you because you can take out your frustration by deleting resumes that use present participle instead of past participle.

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

#127

Post by [deleted] »

DwnVoteHoneyPot wrote: post #33
darth_avocado wrote: post #4

> Your employer definitely got legal advice on anything they put in front of you, why shouldn’t you do the same before signing? Because it costs $700/hour

I tend to work for smaller companies so I've been laid off a few times. I've hired employment lawyers each time. I've paid them approx $2K-$3K each time and have receive much more back.

[deleted]

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

#128

Post by serverholic »

frellus wrote: post #46
OnlineGladiator wrote: post #19

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,…

The equation is far from balanced. What we need is far more cynicism in order to cause change. We've tried less cynicism and it hasn't worked. It just leads to maintaining the status quo.

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

#129

Post by bushbaba »

elil17 wrote: post #40
darth_avocado wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Well don't go to a lawyer in a big city? You can easily interact with a lawyer virtually. Even if all they do is tell you what you could find out in a Google search if you knew what to search, it's going to be more useful for the average person because lawyers have the confidence to interpret legal terminology, contextualize what they are telling you, and recognize what is and is not normal (e.g. notice predatory ter…

I wonder if basic legal issues will one day be handled by something like chatGPT.

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

#130

Post by kenjackson »

OnlineGladiator wrote: post #111
acover wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is the nature of being a cop unethical? I agree there are abuses of the power but from what I've seen in real life it's important work.

I should mention I am referring specifically to police in the United States. The short answer is because cops defend cops, including bad cops. People like to say it's just a few bad apples, but it's far more prevalent than that. And even if it were just 1 in 100, the fact that the cops band together to protect a rapist/murderer/whatever shows that they care more about unity than morals. I realize this answer is lacki…

I tend to think there is a huge selection bias problem. The people that I knew in HS who wanted to be cops (and two did), were exactly the people you did NOT want to meet in a dark alleyway. They abused the power their physical strength gave them in HS... what makes you think they'd act differently with legal strength?

And the people that I think are those who most want to help those in need and are compassionate, careful, and would take accountability seriously are those who don't want to do the job.

There is also a kinship/bond that grows, which is hard to break. It's natural. You see it among sports fans, school alumni, console fan boys, company workers, etc... You see things through exceptionally biased glasses. Try to find a sports fan who feels like their team tends to be FAVORED by refs? You won't find them -- they all seem to think the refs are against their team -- every team's fans feel this way. Every team's fans feel like the fight on the field was instigated by the other team.

Given these things, how do you mitigate against them, and construct a police force that is reasonable? I personally think it has to be external oversight, but this hasn't been easy to implement historically.

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