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HR is not your friend, and other things I think you should know

rachelbythebay.com

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Re: HR is not your friend, and other things I think you should know

#111

Post by musicale »

Boritanian wrote: post #79
jiggawatts wrote: post #14

Many 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 serf cannot 'quit' his lord. An employee can. Everybody can say 'NO' to the CEO. What you cannot do is agree to exchange your work for his money, and then when he asks you to work, say 'NO'. If you do not wish to work, simply cancel this arrangement. And the inquisition could BURN YOU ALIVE. HR cannot even physically touch you for fear of the lawsuit. This comparison is such an insult to the people who had laid the…

> A serf cannot 'quit' his lord. An employee can.

Perhaps the analogy works better for graduate students. Advisors often control a Ph.D. student's academic progress and financial support, and it's very hard to change advisors without starting over from scratch.

Re: HR is not your friend, and other things I think you should know

#112

Post by JMTQp8lwXL »

projectileboy wrote: post #75
MattGaiser wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Very true. Unless you have a sick family member. Until the ACA, you were 100% trapped. Now, you’re not officially trapped, only trapped in practice, because when you switch health plans, the providers who have been working with your kid for the last few years are no longer in your network, and... you get the picture.

Is there a reason to regularly switch plans? I keep the same one each time annual enrollment comes up.

Re: HR is not your friend, and other things I think you should know

#113

Post by itronitron »

ncmncm wrote: post #76
drstewart wrote: post #43

IT is not your friend either. They work for the company, not for you. Legal is not your friend either. They work for the company, not for you. Janitorial staff is not your friend either. They work for the company, not for you. Sales is not your friend either. They work for the company, not for you. Marketing is not your friend either. They work for the company, not for you.

This is the starry-eyed, optimistic view of workplaces. In fact, in each case management works for themselves. HR, most of all. While engineering management has some pressure toward development goals, sales toward sales targets, and top management toward business development, HR has no such objective targets. Typically they even farm out recruiting. What motivates HR management? In most companies, HR is the center of…

How would one go about getting oneself invited to such a convention? or at least the after-hours social events?

Re: HR is not your friend, and other things I think you should know

#114

Post by shoeshoeshoey »

madrox wrote: post #39

I 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.

Re: HR is not your friend, and other things I think you should know

#116

Post by yibg »

HR is not your friend, but sometimes incentives can align. One of the goals of HR is employee retention, and in that incentives do align.

I’ve seen HR really go out of their way to accommodate for personal situations during covid times for example. A lot of it is not seen by the typical employee, but they do happen.

Re: HR is not your friend, and other things I think you should know

#117

Post by NestedLoopGoBrr »

juanbyrge wrote: post #54

Seems like OP observed something unsettling at the office, wanted HR to fire the perpetrator, and HR did not do that. Then OP generalizes and says that HR is not effective and not your friend. However, there are many gray areas where it's hard to justify firing someone. For example, let's say this person was acting passively aggressively and ignoring/avoiding someone. Is that a fireable offense? I am not sure it is.…

Even the situations that you argue are clearcut are not. Say for example two teams in separate locations were working together, solely through email. One had a lead, who effectively lead both teams. One day they all met together in the same location for a team building event, and the other team discovered that lead was black. Suddenly when working together the lead was met with scrutiny, hostility, and even aggression. But because they never said the explicit gotcha words, there is no clearcut situation. And while that lead can raise attention to the problem with management, their only hope is an empathetic manager — which is rarely the case, especially without shared experiences of that kind of problem. Inevitably, that employee quits, because they find themselves stuck in performance reviews that are subpar, courtesy of having uncooperative coworkers (or worse, they poison the well behind this employee’s back), with no real hope for rectifying the situation.

Re: HR is not your friend, and other things I think you should know

#118

Post by timavr »

jiggawatts wrote: post #14

Many 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…

Very on point. We have democracy on a government level and have 1 day in 2 years to select our representatives. For the rest of the time we have to please our boss, that we have not much say about and that has a lot of power about economic circumstances.

Yes, we can always find another boss, but mentally on day to day basis it is not that different to dictatorship.

Re: HR is not your friend, and other things I think you should know

#119

Post by zszugyi »

JMTQp8lwXL wrote: post #112
projectileboy wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very true. Unless you have a sick family member. Until the ACA, you were 100% trapped. Now, you’re not officially trapped, only trapped in practice, because when you switch health plans, the providers who have been working with your kid for the last few years are no longer in your network, and... you get the picture.

Is there a reason to regularly switch plans? I keep the same one each time annual enrollment comes up.

You may be forced to switch when changing employers or when leaving your job and COBRA is not a good option for you.

Re: HR is not your friend, and other things I think you should know

#120

Post by milesskorpen »

coldtea wrote: post #106
viraptor wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With the major difference that these days a lot of people get to choose their employers. Yes, it's not perfect and not everyone can afford that, but we moved significantly from "you live here, this is your lord".

> With the major difference that these days a lot of people get to choose their employers. That was true for many in the feudal times too, they could shop around and pledge their allegiance to one or another feudal lord, and even be given a plot of land to cultivate (as long as the lord got their share of the results). If anything, the feudal lords left them even more to their own devices, and demanded even less of t…

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).

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