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> What happened? HR happened. At first HR is viewed as an afterthought and it doubles as an easy way to get women in your tech company. But after some growth

by arkh 5y ago

> What happened? HR happened. At first HR is viewed as an afterthought and it doubles as an easy way to get women in your tech company. But after some growth they usually get their hands on the power of hiring and firing people. It's just downhill from there.

TeMPOraL 5y ago
HR? Or PR? It's easy to allow and promote freedom of expressing thoughts, any thoughts, even controversial thoughts, if you're an underdog in an underdog industry, whose existence and success depends on being free to think up and try weird things. FAANG of today is not that. FAANG is a bunch of good ol' megacorps now[0]. They're very sensitive about their stock price, about their relationships with investors, customer base. These things are strongly and negatively affected by media controversies, so corps obviously want to minimize such stories. This is how you get a trigger-happy HR: they become the internal enforcement arm of company's ongoing PR efforts. I haven't seen a company that's actually ruled by their HR department. All I've seen is HR protecting their company - and the way this protection looks depends on the company's position and culture. They will absolutely fight for freedom of expression for as long as the company itself needs it to survive and grow. -- [0] - I think it's important to repeat because people old enough to remember how they started, who were adjacent to hacker culture back then, sometimes cling to that image of a bunch of geeks trying to make something about the world better. I know I do, I have to keep reminding myself that Big Tech is just a collection of run-of-the-mill multinationals. They may happen to employ a lot of software developers, some (few) of which work on cutting-edge problems, but they're just corporations, like all other corporations, like all the corporations the hacker culture of yore used to mock.

by arkh 5y ago

TeMPOraL 5y ago

HR? Or PR? It's easy to allow and promote freedom of expressing thoughts, any thoughts, even controversial thoughts, if you're an underdog in an underdog industry, whose existence and success depends on being free to think up and try weird things. FAANG of today is not that. FAANG is a bunch of good ol' megacorps now[0]. They're very sensitive about their stock price, about their relationships with investors, customer base. These things are strongly and negatively affected by media controversies, so corps obviously want to minimize such stories. This is how you get a trigger-happy HR: they become the internal enforcement arm of company's ongoing PR efforts. I haven't seen a company that's actually ruled by their HR department. All I've seen is HR protecting their company - and the way this protection looks depends on the company's position and culture. They will absolutely fight for freedom of expression for as long as the company itself needs it to survive and grow. -- [0] - I think it's important to repeat because people old enough to remember how they started, who were adjacent to hacker culture back then, sometimes cling to that image of a bunch of geeks trying to make something about the world better. I know I do, I have to keep reminding myself that Big Tech is just a collection of run-of-the-mill multinationals. They may happen to employ a lot of software developers, some (few) of which work on cutting-edge problems, but they're just corporations, like all other corporations, like all the corporations the hacker culture of yore used to mock.