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My billion pound company has no HR department
- fazza99 6y agoI've worked at a couple organisations where there was a mantra of 'No HR'. In all cases I saw mistakes and abuses that would / should have been picked up by a sensible HR person. I don't buy it. Granted you don't need entire departments of people but when you get to be a billion-pound company, there will be a need for some expertise.
- watwut 6y agoHow does HR "picks up" abuses? I work in company that has HR, but I don't see them as a place to solve actual issues - basically any of them. They do routine administration just fine, they are useful for that, but that is it. If you actually think that something bad is going on, talking up actual hierarchy (complaining to higher ups) or leaving are only two sensible options. And if complaining to higher ups, then you put your resignation to HR. But none of my interactions with HR made me think that these would be people capable to solve issues. They don't have processes to even realize problems are happening. They don't have trust of employees either.
- donnythecroc 6y agoAgree with this 100% people never seem to realise HR is there to protect the company ONLY. Literally they are a compliance function to stop company getting sued.
- matthewmacleod 6y agoRight you say that, but I swear this view is some kind of really fucking weird Americanism that y'all take as gospel truth. I've interacted with HR teams at a couple of jobs in the UK. These interactions have been fine. They have been there as the contact people to make sure I get paid for my work, that I can access my benefits, and that I am subject to the procedures and processes that I'm entitled to. They are paid by the company and therefore they of course work for the company – and part of that job is ensuring compliance. But this is the same as e.g. a security officer, or a health and safety officer, or any number of other roles the involve running companies correctly and in accordance with best practices in a way that can benefit both company and staff. It's not an "either-or" situation!
- hguant 6y agoI think the big 'Americanism' comes from the somewhat two faced nature of HR culture in the States - HR are (generally!) the people being super friendly and coming up with "the company is one big family aren't we so happy together" events and whatnot. They're also the people who, in my experience, have mostly bought into the MBA-isms about maximizing value in all things, which includes screwing over said employees as much as possible through legal, yet sketchy methods that make a lot of sense if you're treating employees as resources, not humans.
- mbg721 6y agoAt a company I once worked for, HR talked to us prior to interviewing candidates for an open position, with suggested lines of questioning for soft-skills, a framework for the decision process, and reminders of things to avoid for legal reasons. It may have been largely intended to cover the company's backside, but I would say it was useful at heading off some potential problems.
- watwut 6y ago> reminders of things to avoid for legal reasons I would see this as "routine administration". It is useful thing. > with suggested lines of questioning for soft-skills, a framework for the decision process Our HR quite sux in these. They also consistently attempt to match people on positions that don't suit them - both by personality (the persons personality not matching job) and by technical knowledge/background. So their input is not trusted and managers doing hiring consistently complain about it or simply ignore them.
- mytailorisrich 6y agoWhat this usually means is that the functions still exist but are named differently. Unfortunately the article does not go into any details beyond that attention-grabbing headline, but it does not sound very appealing: > "But what if there is a case of bullying to be resolved, or a contract dispute that requires specialist knowledge? Jackson says he expects his managers to take personal responsibility for these things (with appropriate training) rather than "shelving responsibility to a third party" - just as he used to do when managing his teams." Is he seriously claiming that he expects individual managers to deal with employment law disputes themselves? If so it only means that they have not had an employment law dispute yet...
- chmod775 6y agoEdit: I wrote a lot of text for little reason and started rambling, here's the gist instead: If you insert HR in the main company hierarchy, you now have managers who do HR stuff. Even if you don't call it HR, you still have HR.
- watt 6y agobut if you have HR which you call HR, then you might have something else, undesirable, too. I thought this is all understood and does not need spelling out?
- ojnabieoot 6y agoIncidentally: tech managers who have (nontrivial) HR duties are exactly as reliable, competent, and qualified as HR managers with programming and DBA responsibilities. But the latter is self-evidently ridiculous, whereas the former happens all the time...
- leesalminen 6y agoIDK, I’ve never seen HR add value to a company. They’re always a cost center and should be minimized as much as possible in order to hire more engineers.
- jcadam 6y agoGood. Worked for a few big companies where HR ruled with an iron fist. Even senior executives were afraid of them.
- ojnabieoot 6y agoI am curious what you mean by “ruled with an iron fist.” I am curious if you are able to offer a single compelling example. This is an ad hominem but I don’t care: I have seen you here many times before pushing right-wing disinformation - and not something can be chalked up to a valid difference of opinion, but instead indicating that you are either a saboteur or, at best, hopelessly ignorant. I see that yesterday you were pushing the (utterly preposterous and despicable) right-wing conspiracy that the COVID lockdowns are a progressive ruse and that after vaccinations the lockdowns will continue under different pretenses. So I am wondering if maybe your hostility to HR comes from the possibility that you are a right-wing crank who makes employees extremely uncomfortable? I sure as heck wouldn’t hire you for anything!
- danlugo92 6y agoRIP Hacker News 2007 - 2021
- leesalminen 6y agoI once had HR tell me, at a company I founded, that new hires could only begin working on the first of the month. I won that fight and that person was gone fast. Do you work in HR? I don’t think I’d hire you either.
- ojnabieoot 6y agoLMAO how is that “ruling with an iron fist”? You got that person fired! And no, I am a programmer who does not work in HR. Nobody is saying HR is infallible. But a mistake like “HR had a silly policy around hiring” is not as bad for an organization as “the director of engineering got drunk, harassed an intern, and threatened to fire her if she complained.”
- Traster 6y agoIn the video he makes this super weird argument > How can a company learn how to find better and better ways to deal with things if it takes all of the intelligence of its people and diverts them from those big problems. This is an argument for HR and IT, not against. If everyone in your organisation has to go out shopping for their own computer and set up their own sharepoint etc, they're all wasting their time doing something that should've been taken care of for them. The problem isn't the existence of HR and IT, it's the dynamic of HR and IT as a set of interest groups - putting processes in place that make IT or HR's lives easier at the cost of productivity the other employees.
- jka 6y agoA possible interpretation: creating an environment of effective co-operation is a big problem for many companies.
- aloisdg 6y agoeffective co-operation is hard to do when your job is at stake in a pyramidal structure. There is no co-operation when you cant argue with your boss.
- jbob2000 6y agoI work for an enterprise company. The motherboard on one of my staff's macbooks died during the lockdown and it needed to be repaired. Do you know what the Enterprise IT told us to do? "Take it to the Apple store". Are you fucking kidding me? You want me to send my staff out during the lockdown to get a piece of YOUR hardware fixed? No option to ship it, no drop off desk at our office or something. You're absolutely right that when you setup a department called "IT" they are now a group of people that need to be catered to as much as the other staff. "We don't want to expose IT staff to risk, so send your own staff to get the computers repaired. Then it's your fault if they get sick and die." was the message I got.
- Jimmc414 6y agoHR and IT exist today primarily for risk mitigation, not for the benefit of the employee.
- moistbar 6y agoWhat exactly do you think IT does? Risk mitigation is a part of the job, but god damn is that a reductionist view of it.
- scotthtaylor 6y agoBit of a silly video, that didn't really tell me anything.
- vagrantJin 6y agoHR does seem like an inefficiency - and somewhat an internal police force that allows people to subvert personal responsibility. I would argue there are a lot of negatives than any positives. People can work and function without a police force hovering over their every move. The company culture has to be really strong though.
- jmartrican 6y agoI always thought that HR was the most important department. Since humans are the most important resource, then the department that makes sure those resources are safe, secure, not abused, properly vetted, happy, etc., would be the most important. I imagine if I was ever the CEO of a big company that I would be working very closely with HR to make surr we hiring the right people, not abusing them (mostly through bad managers or policies), paying them well, good benefits, and the right incentives. Maybe HR is an underutilized or badly utilized department in certain places. I dont know. Just thoughts I been having about HR. EDIT: I'm not saying that companies are using HR successfully. I am saying that this is my view at how HR can be (and should be) used successfully. It all stems from the realization that humans are a company's most important resource. Accepting that conjecture, having good HR (how ever way you define that) is extremely important.
- goatinaboat 6y agothe department that makes sure those resources are safe, secure, not abused, properly vetted, happy You have a very strange idea of what a HR department does. Its job is to protect management from workers, and that's it. "HR is not your friend" is a common saying for a reason.
- ThePadawan 6y agoI have never been involved in a hiring process (going either way) where the HR department had any interest in hiring the right people. They're literally paper pushers to make sure contracts are drafted correctly, salary payments arrive etc..
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- the_duke 6y agoMay I inquire if you have ever worked for a larger company? You are describing a union. HR exists to serve the companies interests, not the employees. As the name implies, the purpose is to manage, and maximize the efficient utilization of, the resource "human being". This can mean preventing abuse because it's a legal issue or because it's bad for productivity and team morale. But it just as often means shuffling people around and making sure affected employees keep quiet, don't cause a stir or actually sue. This is not black or white, of course, there are companies and HR departments that value employees and try protect them, but there will always be a conflict of interest because the primary goal is to help the company.
- jmuguy 6y agoNot sure I believe that a company with 1200 employees has no centralized IT.
- Forge36 6y agoI can envision the failure now "we lost all the sales data from before 2012" How? "Bob left and he'd been storing everything on the cloud. We didn't notice for a while. Then we couldn't find the password, and after a year passed the data was deleted" (This isn't to say local storage solves the problem. "The folder on the network drive is missing.") How they do this could be it's own article
- signal11 6y agoOctopus is very tech-savvy (especially for a energy utility company), so in theory it's doable, especially in their line of business and size. Note that 1200 is still small as large companies go, especially these days when you don't have to build everything yourself and you can use agile/lean techniques to organize yourself. * a team to manage the cloud relationship for email/web/hosting for their own apps, and colo if needed. * design their own laptop images (or get them designed by the vendor) and outsource laptop provisioning/imaging to a 3rd party. If you use virtual desktops you can use your cloud vendor for hosting them. Both of those could be 5-10 people with the right skills (called it an "infrastructure" team) -- less than 5 is possible but would create key person risk. There's still people with the right set of specialized skills, but it hasn't become a huge bureaucratic organization. Looking at their website, they appear to have a data science team, so none of this precludes them having other teams to address cross-cutting concerns like cyber-sec, reliability, etc. Or from having software developers attached to teams tasked with delivering new products, e.g. they have several API offerings[1]. [1] https://developer.octopus.energy/docs/api/ https://developer.octopus.energy/docs/api/
- Kwpolska 6y ago> Both of those could be 5-10 people with the right skills (called it an "infrastructure" team) Why not call it just the IT team? What would the difference be, really?
- wegs 6y agoI think a lot of this discussion hinges on two roles of HR: 1) Risk management and mitigation, in which it acts like a police department. There are few checks or balances on HR power, and having police often outweighs the benefits of that police. I've heard of organizations where HR was more than a little bit toxic 2) Support and help. As a manager: * I don't know what to do if e.g. a high-performing employee with high-level access to confidential information embezzled the company. A manager will run into situations like that one perhaps once in their career. I'd like to turn that over to professionals who know when to call the police, when to turn off the keycard and shut off IT access, or when to have a stern conversation. * If there's a sexual assault accusation, do I want to be the person who fires someone who might be innocent and has their kids lose their livelihood? Do I want to be the person who tells a potential victim there's not enough evidence. * There's the daily load of questions about vacation policies, health benefits, disabilities, or complex immigration issues. Quite frankly, I have no idea here, and I really don't want to have an idea. My experience is that I run into once-a-career issues perhaps every 6-24 months at my rung of the management ladder, and it's helpful to have people who have been through them several times. I definitely don't want to be in a position of making Tough Choices when Bad Things happen. I'm good at mentorship and tech leadership, not e.g. fraud investigations, and I don't want the emotional load those entail. A good HR department is incredibly helpful (just so long as everyone remembers they work for the company; they're not your agent or some kind of neutral party).