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One thing that every employee needs to understand is that HR is not your friend. No matter how friendly or helpful they seem, their job is not to protect you. I

One thing that every employee needs to understand is that HR is not your friend. No matter how friendly or helpful they seem, their job is not to protect you. It's to protect the company.

godzillabrennus 10y ago
This. HR is there to protect the company and not to help employees. They have to justify their salary somehow. If they ask you to sign something it is usually not in your interest to do what they ask.
- jstandard 10y ago
  This is a bit hyperbolic, please take a step back and consider if you would actually say "you have to justify your salary somehow" in person to folks in your company's HR department. HR does protect the company, but it also helps employees tremendously. I've had several beneficial experiences with Human Resources folks. One company setting a bad example is no reason to dump on an entire profession.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
kevinburke 10y ago
I guess to some degree "protecting the company" involves implementing procedures that protect the company from losing a class action lawsuit and damaging their ability to recruit engineers, right?
- thewhitetulip 10y ago
  not in their short sighted world, shortsightedness like this is the major reason why companies stagnate and refuse to innovate, they don't want to touch their cash cow
- tehlike 10y ago
  it also depends on what the projected cost of class action lawsuit. My understanding is, it's usually a fraction of what it could have been. it's mostly anectodal, though (reading news online, etc).
blawson 10y ago
Sure, but what's the alternative, especially in a case like this? Your manager is engaging in harassment, HR is where you "should" raise this. Her following protocol also makes her case stronger I would argue. You gave your company the chance to make things right. After that I'd say the gloves could come off if that's the route you want to go.
- pjmlp 10y ago
  In countries where unions do work, that is another door to go search for help.
  - chimeracoder 10y ago
    > In countries where unions do work, that is another door to go search for help. That assumes your union rep is inclined to help you. In practice (not principle), they have the same incentives as the other managers and HR do in this story. The union rep could decide that the harasser is more important to their union, politically, than you are, and decide not to take action. Plus, the union can simply terminate your membership as retaliation. For a closed shop, that's equivalent to firing you, but without many of the legal protections that come against wrongful termination.
    - pjmlp 10y ago
      Which is why I added the remark "do work", not when they are just yet another way to take vacations.
      - chimeracoder 10y ago
        > Which is why I added the remark "[in countries where unions] do work", not when they are just yet another way to take vacations. That's not a matter that's specific to a particular country, though. It's inherent in the nature of a union structure (and arguably inherent in the nature of any hierarchical human structure, which is a superset of "unions"). You can find situations like the one I described in any country, not just the US.
bphogan 10y ago
Yup. This gets posted from time to time, but if you work for a company, you really owe it to yourself to read Corporate Confidential. https://www.amazon.com/Corporate-Confidential-Secrets-Company-Know/dp/0312337361 https://www.amazon.com/Corporate-Confidential-Secrets-Compan...
obstinate 10y ago
I hear this truism a lot, along with "companies must put the profit obligation first." It's only true in a very limited technical sense. When someone is harassing you, "protecting the company" generally means making sure that person doesn't harass you or anyone else, often by firing them. Because if they don't, the company is at risk of massive liability. That doesn't mean they can't be terrible at their jobs, or fail to understand what the true purpose of their job is. But that's a potentiality that's not limited to HR. *Not a lawyer, but this is what I was told at my employer's harassment and legal training, which all employees are obligated to attend.
- chimeracoder 10y ago
  It's true, and to some extent the problem is that you hear about the bad HR stories, but rarely the good ones - in which they quietly take action, but nobody except the parties involved ever notice. When HR does their job right, nobody other than those people even notices that they're there. That said, lots of companies have HR departments that are terrible, so it all depends on whether you think yours is trustworthy and competent or not.
  - daemin 10y ago
    Kind of the same can be said about IT. If they do their job correctly then nobody should notice they are there. Also about finance/payroll and others.
- EliRivers 10y ago
  ...along with "companies must put the profit obligation first." At risk of labouring your point; which also certainly isn't true in a legal (and thus actual) sense.
dclowd9901 10y ago
Sure they're not your friend, but Jesus Christ, the amount of legal trouble this particular HR establishment exposed themselves to through their actions is breathtaking. THAT'S their job: to prevent the company from getting sued!! In this case I'm completely bewildered as to why HR handled this particular situation so clumsily.
- hn_throwaway_99 10y ago
  Agreed. The "HR is not your friend" trope gets thrown out a lot, but in cases where your goals align with the company's (i.e. you don't want to get harassed, and the company doesn't want to get sued), HR is the place you should be able to go.
  - thewhitetulip 10y ago
    > Should be able to go Yes, in theory. But most HRs "protect the org" in the most short sighted way possible
    - abraae 10y ago
      That's a sweeping statement that I utterly disagree with. We do HR software, I've interacted with many HR people at many companies and I've never even heard of anything as outrageous as the behavior described in this case. In no way is it the way"most HRs" behave.
      - bambax 10y ago
        My experience is different. Every HR person I have ever interacted with was either entirely clueless or immensely evil.
        raverbashing 10y ago
        I've had some bad experiences, but I've never felt the need to describe them in those terms. And yes, even in the worse case
meritt 10y ago
If HR had actually done their job, Kalanick wouldn't be spending a Sunday night struggling to reattach his unicorn's horn.
- csharpminor 10y ago
  HR is just the messenger. This rests squarely on the shoulders of Uber's management. They were informed and refused to act. The buck stops with them. Also, having the number of woman engineers drop from 25% to less than 3% on that team should have been a red flag well in advance of this ever being published.
  - rhizome 10y ago
    There's indeed a lot to hang on upper management, but HR has responsibilities delegated to them for a reason. I'm sure heads will roll, but presumably they've been cruising without an HR reboot for years, so a lot of habits and perspectives are going to be entrenched.
    - nedwin 10y ago
      Unfortunately more often that not HR, in my limited experience, does not have these responsibilities delegated to them. This case sounds like either completely inexperienced and untrained HRBPs OR they're being overinfluenced/overrun by management. Possibly both.
      - rhizome 10y ago
        I would guess more the former. Execs think it's boring (or worse: a blind spot), consequently don't hire well for the positions, the pretty soon the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing.
rdtsc 10y ago
Good point. I gotta wonder about their general competence. What are the credentials to be an HR person? Here, even if they really wanted to discredit her and protect the company (so assuming they completely were not prepared to take her side, ever) they acted in a very stupid manner it seems. Is there an HR major? Or is it MBA student who never graduate? How does one end up picking a good HR person vs just a friend-of-a-friend? Programmers go to an interviews and they get slammed with whiteboard silly algorithm questions. What kind of question do HR people have to answer to pass the test? It seems here protecting the company would have been firing the person proposing sex on the spot. Blog author even had the chat logs as evidence from what I understand! Now the answer is probably they had defended and covered up that manager's behavior before. Blog alludes to that. So it became a pattern. Then just when another similar complaint popped up, admitting it was wrong and doing anything besides what they did before, would have meant acknowledging how wrong they have been in the past. "But we've already covered up for him 10 times, why is this special now..." kind of deal.
- csharpminor 10y ago
  HR is subordinate to management. It sounds as though management was unwilling to take action to remove the responsible individual.
  - rhizome 10y ago
    I think it's likely they were just "out of sight, out of mind" about HR details; it's not the most exciting part of running a business. They didn't get to call it "Boober" by bragging about new funds in the 401(k) plan.
- dkarapetyan 10y ago
  They were gaslighting her. This is how incompetent people do cover ups. Well maybe they were not so incompetent but had never faced anyone clever enough to see through the bullshit.
- ThrustVectoring 10y ago
  >Now the answer is probably they had defended and covered up that manager's behavior before. Blog alludes to that. So it became a pattern. Then just when another similar complaint popped up, admitting it was wrong and doing anything besides what they did before, would have meant acknowledging how wrong they have been in the past. "But we've already covered up for him 10 times, why is this special now..." kind of deal. That analysis lets management offer HR as a scapegoat too easily, IMO. Why was HR willing to defend and cover up that managers behavior the first time? "If you make things difficult for me, things will end up difficult for you", and you end up promoting sycophants and pushing out anyone with a spine. In other words, HR doesn't create corporate culture. Management does. And the culture they wound up with both convinces managers that they can get away with this BS, and HR to cover it up.
skc 10y ago
OT but I've been wondering about this. I work in South Africa and have done so for some really big corporates as well as small boutique companies. Without fail, every HR department has been the one department where you will find the majority of staff are women. I don't know if this is the same everywhere else in the world, but it strikes me as particularly insidious in this Uber case where, in an obviously apparent misogynistic culture, a female employee is having to report these issues to a female HR rep who in turn is being forced to toe whatever dubious, unwritten company line Uber works under. I mean this passage here... " She then asked me if women engineers at Uber were friends and talked a lot, and then asked me how often we communicated, what we talked about, what email addresses we used to communicate, which chat rooms we frequented, etc." ...made my skin crawl. I just think HR in general is an extremely subversive environment.
Chinjut 10y ago
There is a corollary of this which is underappreciated as well: your employer (the whole company, not just HR) is not your friend. No matter how friendly or helpful they seem, their job is not to protect you. It's to protect themselves.
mistercow 10y ago
That's true, but in this case HR wasn't really the company's friend either. The overwhelming sense that I got from reading her post is that Uber's company culture is super broken. Everyone's looking out for themselves, rather than the company, including the HR department. If they were actually trying to help the company, they would have taken action to reduce its liability. Instead, they played politics.
hmans 10y ago
That's a very American thing to say.
snambi 10y ago
Sorry, their job is to protect the management.
Arizhel 10y ago
That's only in theory. In many companies, the apparent job of HR is to allow the HR director to act like a little Napoleon, even if it harms the company substantially.

One thing that every employee needs to understand is that HR is not your friend. No matter how friendly or helpful they seem, their job is not to protect you. It's to protect the company.

godzillabrennus 10y ago

This. HR is there to protect the company and not to help employees. They have to justify their salary somehow. If they ask you to sign something it is usually not in your interest to do what they ask.

jstandard 10y ago
This is a bit hyperbolic, please take a step back and consider if you would actually say "you have to justify your salary somehow" in person to folks in your company's HR department. HR does protect the company, but it also helps employees tremendously. I've had several beneficial experiences with Human Resources folks. One company setting a bad example is no reason to dump on an entire profession.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

kevinburke 10y ago

I guess to some degree "protecting the company" involves implementing procedures that protect the company from losing a class action lawsuit and damaging their ability to recruit engineers, right?

thewhitetulip 10y ago
not in their short sighted world, shortsightedness like this is the major reason why companies stagnate and refuse to innovate, they don't want to touch their cash cow
tehlike 10y ago
it also depends on what the projected cost of class action lawsuit. My understanding is, it's usually a fraction of what it could have been. it's mostly anectodal, though (reading news online, etc).

blawson 10y ago

Sure, but what's the alternative, especially in a case like this? Your manager is engaging in harassment, HR is where you "should" raise this. Her following protocol also makes her case stronger I would argue. You gave your company the chance to make things right. After that I'd say the gloves could come off if that's the route you want to go.

pjmlp 10y ago
In countries where unions do work, that is another door to go search for help.
- chimeracoder 10y ago
  > In countries where unions do work, that is another door to go search for help. That assumes your union rep is inclined to help you. In practice (not principle), they have the same incentives as the other managers and HR do in this story. The union rep could decide that the harasser is more important to their union, politically, than you are, and decide not to take action. Plus, the union can simply terminate your membership as retaliation. For a closed shop, that's equivalent to firing you, but without many of the legal protections that come against wrongful termination.
  - pjmlp 10y ago
    Which is why I added the remark "do work", not when they are just yet another way to take vacations.
    - chimeracoder 10y ago
      > Which is why I added the remark "[in countries where unions] do work", not when they are just yet another way to take vacations. That's not a matter that's specific to a particular country, though. It's inherent in the nature of a union structure (and arguably inherent in the nature of any hierarchical human structure, which is a superset of "unions"). You can find situations like the one I described in any country, not just the US.

bphogan 10y ago

Yup. This gets posted from time to time, but if you work for a company, you really owe it to yourself to read Corporate Confidential. https://www.amazon.com/Corporate-Confidential-Secrets-Company-Know/dp/0312337361 https://www.amazon.com/Corporate-Confidential-Secrets-Compan...

obstinate 10y ago

I hear this truism a lot, along with "companies must put the profit obligation first." It's only true in a very limited technical sense. When someone is harassing you, "protecting the company" generally means making sure that person doesn't harass you or anyone else, often by firing them. Because if they don't, the company is at risk of massive liability. That doesn't mean they can't be terrible at their jobs, or fail to understand what the true purpose of their job is. But that's a potentiality that's not limited to HR. *Not a lawyer, but this is what I was told at my employer's harassment and legal training, which all employees are obligated to attend.

chimeracoder 10y ago
It's true, and to some extent the problem is that you hear about the bad HR stories, but rarely the good ones - in which they quietly take action, but nobody except the parties involved ever notice. When HR does their job right, nobody other than those people even notices that they're there. That said, lots of companies have HR departments that are terrible, so it all depends on whether you think yours is trustworthy and competent or not.
- daemin 10y ago
  Kind of the same can be said about IT. If they do their job correctly then nobody should notice they are there. Also about finance/payroll and others.
EliRivers 10y ago
...along with "companies must put the profit obligation first." At risk of labouring your point; which also certainly isn't true in a legal (and thus actual) sense.

dclowd9901 10y ago

Sure they're not your friend, but Jesus Christ, the amount of legal trouble this particular HR establishment exposed themselves to through their actions is breathtaking. THAT'S their job: to prevent the company from getting sued!! In this case I'm completely bewildered as to why HR handled this particular situation so clumsily.

hn_throwaway_99 10y ago
Agreed. The "HR is not your friend" trope gets thrown out a lot, but in cases where your goals align with the company's (i.e. you don't want to get harassed, and the company doesn't want to get sued), HR is the place you should be able to go.
- thewhitetulip 10y ago
  > Should be able to go Yes, in theory. But most HRs "protect the org" in the most short sighted way possible
  - abraae 10y ago
    That's a sweeping statement that I utterly disagree with. We do HR software, I've interacted with many HR people at many companies and I've never even heard of anything as outrageous as the behavior described in this case. In no way is it the way"most HRs" behave.
    - bambax 10y ago
      My experience is different. Every HR person I have ever interacted with was either entirely clueless or immensely evil.
      - raverbashing 10y ago
        I've had some bad experiences, but I've never felt the need to describe them in those terms. And yes, even in the worse case

meritt 10y ago

If HR had actually done their job, Kalanick wouldn't be spending a Sunday night struggling to reattach his unicorn's horn.

csharpminor 10y ago
HR is just the messenger. This rests squarely on the shoulders of Uber's management. They were informed and refused to act. The buck stops with them. Also, having the number of woman engineers drop from 25% to less than 3% on that team should have been a red flag well in advance of this ever being published.
- rhizome 10y ago
  There's indeed a lot to hang on upper management, but HR has responsibilities delegated to them for a reason. I'm sure heads will roll, but presumably they've been cruising without an HR reboot for years, so a lot of habits and perspectives are going to be entrenched.
  - nedwin 10y ago
    Unfortunately more often that not HR, in my limited experience, does not have these responsibilities delegated to them. This case sounds like either completely inexperienced and untrained HRBPs OR they're being overinfluenced/overrun by management. Possibly both.
    - rhizome 10y ago
      I would guess more the former. Execs think it's boring (or worse: a blind spot), consequently don't hire well for the positions, the pretty soon the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing.

rdtsc 10y ago

Good point. I gotta wonder about their general competence. What are the credentials to be an HR person? Here, even if they really wanted to discredit her and protect the company (so assuming they completely were not prepared to take her side, ever) they acted in a very stupid manner it seems. Is there an HR major? Or is it MBA student who never graduate? How does one end up picking a good HR person vs just a friend-of-a-friend? Programmers go to an interviews and they get slammed with whiteboard silly algorithm questions. What kind of question do HR people have to answer to pass the test? It seems here protecting the company would have been firing the person proposing sex on the spot. Blog author even had the chat logs as evidence from what I understand! Now the answer is probably they had defended and covered up that manager's behavior before. Blog alludes to that. So it became a pattern. Then just when another similar complaint popped up, admitting it was wrong and doing anything besides what they did before, would have meant acknowledging how wrong they have been in the past. "But we've already covered up for him 10 times, why is this special now..." kind of deal.

csharpminor 10y ago
HR is subordinate to management. It sounds as though management was unwilling to take action to remove the responsible individual.
- rhizome 10y ago
  I think it's likely they were just "out of sight, out of mind" about HR details; it's not the most exciting part of running a business. They didn't get to call it "Boober" by bragging about new funds in the 401(k) plan.
dkarapetyan 10y ago
They were gaslighting her. This is how incompetent people do cover ups. Well maybe they were not so incompetent but had never faced anyone clever enough to see through the bullshit.
ThrustVectoring 10y ago
>Now the answer is probably they had defended and covered up that manager's behavior before. Blog alludes to that. So it became a pattern. Then just when another similar complaint popped up, admitting it was wrong and doing anything besides what they did before, would have meant acknowledging how wrong they have been in the past. "But we've already covered up for him 10 times, why is this special now..." kind of deal. That analysis lets management offer HR as a scapegoat too easily, IMO. Why was HR willing to defend and cover up that managers behavior the first time? "If you make things difficult for me, things will end up difficult for you", and you end up promoting sycophants and pushing out anyone with a spine. In other words, HR doesn't create corporate culture. Management does. And the culture they wound up with both convinces managers that they can get away with this BS, and HR to cover it up.

skc 10y ago

OT but I've been wondering about this. I work in South Africa and have done so for some really big corporates as well as small boutique companies. Without fail, every HR department has been the one department where you will find the majority of staff are women. I don't know if this is the same everywhere else in the world, but it strikes me as particularly insidious in this Uber case where, in an obviously apparent misogynistic culture, a female employee is having to report these issues to a female HR rep who in turn is being forced to toe whatever dubious, unwritten company line Uber works under. I mean this passage here... " She then asked me if women engineers at Uber were friends and talked a lot, and then asked me how often we communicated, what we talked about, what email addresses we used to communicate, which chat rooms we frequented, etc." ...made my skin crawl. I just think HR in general is an extremely subversive environment.

Chinjut 10y ago

There is a corollary of this which is underappreciated as well: your employer (the whole company, not just HR) is not your friend. No matter how friendly or helpful they seem, their job is not to protect you. It's to protect themselves.

mistercow 10y ago

That's true, but in this case HR wasn't really the company's friend either. The overwhelming sense that I got from reading her post is that Uber's company culture is super broken. Everyone's looking out for themselves, rather than the company, including the HR department. If they were actually trying to help the company, they would have taken action to reduce its liability. Instead, they played politics.

hmans 10y ago

That's a very American thing to say.

snambi 10y ago

Sorry, their job is to protect the management.

Arizhel 10y ago

That's only in theory. In many companies, the apparent job of HR is to allow the HR director to act like a little Napoleon, even if it harms the company substantially.