6 ms·

Things HR Won't Tell You

62 points by georgecmu 17y ago

iamdave 17y ago
I've sort of held the belief that as time went on, towards the latter half of the early 2000's decade that employers apparently woke up, and realized that people are either (A) desperate to have jobs or (B) desperately hoping they'll still have theirs in the morning and used the opportunity to squeeze whatever control they could out of the fact. So little worker bees in the office are so terrified that anything as much as a sneeze will get them fired because there are thousands more people ready and willing to take that position.
- Qz 17y ago
  This is exactly the mentality that makes many Americans so paranoid about immigrants.
  - iamdave 17y ago
    I understand your point, but I'm not worried about an illegal immigrant taking my Sys Admin job. And that's the general argument that I try to support. "They're taking our jobs" Correction, they're taking the jobs Americans are often too lazy or too elitist to apply for, when out of work. Manual labor isn't beneath anyone, present company included-but statements along the lines of immigrants taking jobs seems to indicate that's how people really think.
    - gcb 17y ago
      in california i hardly see any american. Be it in the streets, in the bars, in the fortune 500 offices... My guess is that the entire state is a piramid scheme for immigrants
      - nostrademons 17y ago
        Many of the people you assume are foreigners were probably born and/or raised in this country. A bunch of them probably had parents that were born or raised in this country. Don't confuse ethnicity with citizenship.
        _delirium 17y ago
        It's not that unlikely that a randomly chosen person you see in California actually will be foreign-born, though, since about 1 in 4 people in the state were born outside the country.
        nostrademons 17y ago
        There's a big difference between "hardly see any" and "75%".
        gcb 17y ago
        i may not be distributed accros the state like the statistic :)
        gcb 17y ago
        i'm not confusing. I'm using it in the same meaning it was thrown into the previous discussion. I would pass as a "local" by ethnics preconcept standards btw. Even though i'm around for much less time then the others that get the full "immigrant treatment".
    - Qz 17y ago
      I mean, I think it's a crazy mentality seeing as most of the people who think it have parents or relatives who were immigrants (and we're almost all immigrants if you go back far enough).
- gaius 17y ago
  Jack Welch of GE, when asked about corporate loyalty, replied "It's Friday, you got paid, we're even".
barrkel 17y ago
Enforced arbitration clauses strike me as the most worrying thing. As described, it amounts to signing away your statutory rights and submitting to some form of private justice, somewhat like a non-free person. The most horrific case I've heard about is of course the Jamie Leigh Jones one.
- varaon 17y ago
  I would be in favor of legislation limiting what can be sent to arbitration and what can't. i.e. Cases like the Jamie Leigh Jones case should not be left to arbitration.
- cdr 17y ago
  Private arbitration as it currently stands in the US is hopelessly broken. There are numerous conflicts of interest for arbiters, all favoring employers. As the article says, arbiters find in favor of employees in 30% of cases at best. I'd prefer to see mandatory arbitration made completely illegal until it can be fixed - if it can be fixed.
  - gamble 17y ago
    The point of arbitration is that it's biased in favor of one party. We have a system to arbitrate disputes between parties with a minimum of bias - it's called the civil court system. If you could 'fix' arbitration, it would be indistinguishable from a court of law.
  - tedunangst 17y ago
    Is it really valid to assume that fair decisions should be split 50/50?
    - nostrademons 17y ago
      Probably not, but if you know that arbitrators are paid by the employer, and will be doing repeat business with the employer, and then find for the employer 88% of the time, it ought to raise a few eyebrows.
- 17y ago
pierrefar 17y ago
According to the article, we should comment here about it with our views, lest these threads are monitored and lead to our firing.
alanthonyc 17y ago
Excellent timing for me. Just this past week, I set up a Wufoo form as a performance review for myself. I asked a bunch of users at my current client to fill it out to let me know how I've been doing. I thought it would be useful for me, since I don't have any formal feedback mechanisms as an independent consultant. Everyone was happy to oblige and several filled out a form. Then I got a call from someone who, just on a whim, decided to check with HR first. That's how we found out that it's against company policy to allow people to provide feedback to outside consultants. This is in case the consultant gets let go and the feedback contradicts that of the consultant's direct supervisor. If some kind of dispute arises, they want everything to match the company line. Having worked for these types of corporations for so long, I completely understand how this policy came about. However, thoughts of "evil" Toby from "The Office" keep cropping up somehow.
tptacek 17y ago
HR also won't tell you that they report to the CFO, that their performance is measured almost entirely in terms of managing fully loaded headcount cost, that they have virtually no incentive whatsoever to help you in any way, that no clueful manager in the company wants to hire through their candidates because the good candidates find the real hiring manager themselves, that despite no particular qualifications to do so they are often solely responsible for determining the structure of your health benefits, and that as a pure cost center perched anomalously close to the top of the org chart with access and alleged influence over compensation information they are one of the most political divisions in the company. Basically, that they're evil.
- justinph 17y ago
  This. HR Never works for you. HR works for management.
  - gaius 17y ago
    The purpose of HR, in a nutshell, is to protect the company from its own employees. In practice "the company" means "senior management". They have a secondary purpose as well, which is to perpetuate their own existence. And, that's all.
- timwiseman 17y ago
  It depends on the company. I have seen companies where that does about sum it up. On the flip side, I have had HR reps bend over backwards to help me when I had the slightest problem with my health insurance when I was a more junior employee. As a manager, I have had the pleasure of working with HR departments that did the grunt work of posting the job openings for me, but simply passed on all resumes for me to filter as I choose and they have been extremely helpful in handling a lot of paperwork so I didn't have to. In short, I have seen HR departments that are a nightmare (especially for the line employees) as you described, but I have also seen them be true blessings both for the corporate leadership and for the individual worker. Thankfully I've worked with far more of the latter than the former.

62 points by georgecmu 17y ago

I've sort of held the belief that as time went on, towards the latter half of the early 2000's decade that employers apparently woke up, and realized that people are either (A) desperate to have jobs or (B) desperately hoping they'll still have theirs in the morning and used the opportunity to squeeze whatever control they could out of the fact. So little worker bees in the office are so terrified that anything as much as a sneeze will get them fired because there are thousands more people ready and willing to take that position.

Qz 17y ago
This is exactly the mentality that makes many Americans so paranoid about immigrants.
- iamdave 17y ago
  I understand your point, but I'm not worried about an illegal immigrant taking my Sys Admin job. And that's the general argument that I try to support. "They're taking our jobs" Correction, they're taking the jobs Americans are often too lazy or too elitist to apply for, when out of work. Manual labor isn't beneath anyone, present company included-but statements along the lines of immigrants taking jobs seems to indicate that's how people really think.
  - gcb 17y ago
    in california i hardly see any american. Be it in the streets, in the bars, in the fortune 500 offices... My guess is that the entire state is a piramid scheme for immigrants
    - nostrademons 17y ago
      Many of the people you assume are foreigners were probably born and/or raised in this country. A bunch of them probably had parents that were born or raised in this country. Don't confuse ethnicity with citizenship.
      - _delirium 17y ago
        It's not that unlikely that a randomly chosen person you see in California actually will be foreign-born, though, since about 1 in 4 people in the state were born outside the country.
        nostrademons 17y ago
        There's a big difference between "hardly see any" and "75%".
        gcb 17y ago
        i may not be distributed accros the state like the statistic :)
      - gcb 17y ago
        i'm not confusing. I'm using it in the same meaning it was thrown into the previous discussion. I would pass as a "local" by ethnics preconcept standards btw. Even though i'm around for much less time then the others that get the full "immigrant treatment".
  - Qz 17y ago
    I mean, I think it's a crazy mentality seeing as most of the people who think it have parents or relatives who were immigrants (and we're almost all immigrants if you go back far enough).
gaius 17y ago
Jack Welch of GE, when asked about corporate loyalty, replied "It's Friday, you got paid, we're even".

barrkel 17y ago

Enforced arbitration clauses strike me as the most worrying thing. As described, it amounts to signing away your statutory rights and submitting to some form of private justice, somewhat like a non-free person. The most horrific case I've heard about is of course the Jamie Leigh Jones one.

varaon 17y ago
I would be in favor of legislation limiting what can be sent to arbitration and what can't. i.e. Cases like the Jamie Leigh Jones case should not be left to arbitration.
cdr 17y ago
Private arbitration as it currently stands in the US is hopelessly broken. There are numerous conflicts of interest for arbiters, all favoring employers. As the article says, arbiters find in favor of employees in 30% of cases at best. I'd prefer to see mandatory arbitration made completely illegal until it can be fixed - if it can be fixed.
- gamble 17y ago
  The point of arbitration is that it's biased in favor of one party. We have a system to arbitrate disputes between parties with a minimum of bias - it's called the civil court system. If you could 'fix' arbitration, it would be indistinguishable from a court of law.
- tedunangst 17y ago
  Is it really valid to assume that fair decisions should be split 50/50?
  - nostrademons 17y ago
    Probably not, but if you know that arbitrators are paid by the employer, and will be doing repeat business with the employer, and then find for the employer 88% of the time, it ought to raise a few eyebrows.
17y ago

pierrefar 17y ago

According to the article, we should comment here about it with our views, lest these threads are monitored and lead to our firing.

alanthonyc 17y ago

Excellent timing for me. Just this past week, I set up a Wufoo form as a performance review for myself. I asked a bunch of users at my current client to fill it out to let me know how I've been doing. I thought it would be useful for me, since I don't have any formal feedback mechanisms as an independent consultant. Everyone was happy to oblige and several filled out a form. Then I got a call from someone who, just on a whim, decided to check with HR first. That's how we found out that it's against company policy to allow people to provide feedback to outside consultants. This is in case the consultant gets let go and the feedback contradicts that of the consultant's direct supervisor. If some kind of dispute arises, they want everything to match the company line. Having worked for these types of corporations for so long, I completely understand how this policy came about. However, thoughts of "evil" Toby from "The Office" keep cropping up somehow.

tptacek 17y ago

HR also won't tell you that they report to the CFO, that their performance is measured almost entirely in terms of managing fully loaded headcount cost, that they have virtually no incentive whatsoever to help you in any way, that no clueful manager in the company wants to hire through their candidates because the good candidates find the real hiring manager themselves, that despite no particular qualifications to do so they are often solely responsible for determining the structure of your health benefits, and that as a pure cost center perched anomalously close to the top of the org chart with access and alleged influence over compensation information they are one of the most political divisions in the company. Basically, that they're evil.

justinph 17y ago
This. HR Never works for you. HR works for management.
- gaius 17y ago
  The purpose of HR, in a nutshell, is to protect the company from its own employees. In practice "the company" means "senior management". They have a secondary purpose as well, which is to perpetuate their own existence. And, that's all.
timwiseman 17y ago
It depends on the company. I have seen companies where that does about sum it up. On the flip side, I have had HR reps bend over backwards to help me when I had the slightest problem with my health insurance when I was a more junior employee. As a manager, I have had the pleasure of working with HR departments that did the grunt work of posting the job openings for me, but simply passed on all resumes for me to filter as I choose and they have been extremely helpful in handling a lot of paperwork so I didn't have to. In short, I have seen HR departments that are a nightmare (especially for the line employees) as you described, but I have also seen them be true blessings both for the corporate leadership and for the individual worker. Thankfully I've worked with far more of the latter than the former.