Maybe I have seen too much shit in my time but everything in this article makes me squirm about where we have come with respect to HR/People practices. The job

Maybe I have seen too much shit in my time but everything in this article makes me squirm about where we have come with respect to HR/People practices. The job of HR is to maintain the working conditions for people to continue doing what they are being paid to. This usually means ensuring some simple, sane processes and getting the fuck out of the way. But more often than not, we see HR as this pervasive, all permeating entity that keeps biting off more than it can chew in trying to justify its presence. There is a process for every thing and this is how we do it. Everyone must follow these processes and we need to standardize. And these processes tend to be complex monstrosities that change all the time because no one ever lost their job for attempting to do a lot of work. What organisations fail to see is that, the more people have to deal with such complex monstrosities, the more they have to adapt to changing policies and incentives, the more time they have to spend mulling about and carrying out these processes. Time and effort that detracts from work that people were hired for, which was supposed to be the job of HR to ensure in the first place. I think a good acid test for the functioning of HR is to see how visible they are in the environment. If you are having to hear from them a lot, or you find yourself carrying out their mandate frequently, then they are probably not doing a great job.