I read that many times on HN, like a revelation "HR is not your side". This sounds pretty obvious to me. My interaction with HR has never been more than updating some administrative information or sending them documents they need. And the day they'll fire me, why should I expect any special favour from them? I don't see them more on "my side" than the IRS or my landlord.
Having friends in HR is fine, but HR is not your friend
161–170 of 235 posts
Re: Having friends in HR is fine, but HR is not your friend
#162HR 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…
> I think a lot of these sorts of articles discount the idea that your goals and the company's will frequently align.
I have to remind a lot of people that HR is not your friend, but that doesn't mean HR is your enemy.
A lot of young people are reading "HR is not your friend" articles and assume that they need to go to war with HR. I've had to mentor some people out of weird situations where HR was trying to genuinely help them, but they refused to engage with HR at all due to some anecdote or article they read online.
The common examples is being PIPed. A lot of people panic as soon as they see anything resembling a PIP because the internet tells them it's a formality before they're fired. In contrast, many HR departments have metrics and incentives that make them want to retain employees at any cost, because it looks bad on them if they can't retain people or they're hiring people who underperform and can't be brought up to expected levels of performance. Contrary to what the internet says, a lot of PIP programs can actually result in positive improvements and good long term outcomes, but a lot of people just shut down and resent the company too much to even engage once it happens.
Re: Having friends in HR is fine, but HR is not your friend
#163I don’t think they’re evil either, but the recent pivot to the insane pursuit of “diversity” and “inclusion” seems to threaten a good working environment.
Required trainings on “pronoun politics” displace what could be trainings in communication, customer service, and professionalism, or even “email etiquette”, all of which our mostly foreign engineering team could really benefit from.
Re: Having friends in HR is fine, but HR is not your friend
#164Earlier quoted context omitted.
Power is corrupting, and police have a de facto shit-ton of real, immediate power over everyone in their vicinity. They have a "martial law bubble" around them that allows them to physically assault you, put you in jail, and upend your whole life with very little effort. You will have no recourse, and they will suffer no consequences. You may file a complaint with the department, and it will be followed up on, poorly…
In my life experience an unsavory character turned law abiding citizen I found that I used to think ill of cops but after I changed, miraculously cops seemed to turn into amazing fantastic people. So I take all of these "cops are evil" claims with a grain of salt and seek out more context clues to what would initiate an interaction with LEO in the first place.
This reads like "the problem disappears as soon as I'm no longer impacted". Just because cops see/treat you differently now doesn't mean they aren't still treating others poorly.
Re: Having friends in HR is fine, but HR is not your friend
#165HR 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…
‘When HR thinks it’s their job to administrate, you’ve already lost.’
One way to more closely align HR with employees is to focus them on championing a certain set of empowerment values. C-Levels should thus use HR to listen and aggregate employee info, and (importantly) use complimentary soft skills in HR to provide coaching to both high and low performers. This is rare but a feasible vision for a nascent HR org.
The same coaching and development goes for those within HR. Being a BP is really not a long-term career for most. I’ve seen a lot of HR peeps do a rotation for a year or two and then go off to be a founder or transition into very different career tracks. If you treat the HR lower ranks well, that energy can help spread to the rest of the team.
It’s really easy to get this wrong, especially in tech where Founders are poor at soft skills and/or hyper product focused. The OP I feel is a very generous view of the norm. But if you want to form a world-class HR team, there are much higher marks to chase.
Re: Having friends in HR is fine, but HR is not your friend
#166This generally applies to the whole company. You can have friends in fellow staff but they're not your friends.
(Terms and conditions apply, your mileage may vary. A friend doesn't throw a friend under the bus if times get though).
Re: Having friends in HR is fine, but HR is not your friend
#167> HR aren’t evil, they’re just doing a job
I am not trying to say HR is evil but this line of reasoning makes literally no sense.
Whether someone is just doing the job has absolutely nothing to do with if the job they are doing is evil. "They are just doing their jobs" should never be used to justify anyone's actions. For brevity, I will skip all the war crime analogies that everyone can think of.
Re: Having friends in HR is fine, but HR is not your friend
#168I 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…
You can sum it up by saying "work is not your family".
Re: Having friends in HR is fine, but HR is not your friend
#169In essence, HR is the buffer between humans and systems. They create the systems that allow humans to do things like work and be compensated for their work, or to work in an environment where they can expect not to be harassed—at baseline. They clean up everyone's mess when the interface between human and system is compromised.
If a system breaks down, it's HR's job to figure out how to handle the errors. Every company's HR will encounter unwinnable situations where all HR can do is remember the "error code" for next time and, if they're lucky, create systems or policies that prevent it from happening again.
Some (very few) companies have more thoughtfully designed systems that enable the HR team to act proactively on behalf of the employees.
And some (most) companies are poorly structured such that the system is constantly breaking and it's HR's job to keep the company's cadence going as best they can.
I'm guessing most people in this thread have experienced more of the latter.
Re: Having friends in HR is fine, but HR is not your friend
#170HR 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…
Exactly my thought, if a company has lawyers legal-wise, they also has HR social-wise. Same kind of justice