5 ms·

Why Moderna Merged Its Tech and HR Departments

38 points by andy99 1y ago

constantcrying 1y ago
The only thing I can imagine being more hellish than your coworkers being HR people is your coworkers being HR people who use LLMs to do their jobs. This is just guesswork, but I think it is likely that HR came under serious pressure as many of their jobs started to become very obviously obsolete. So the HR chief came up with a plan to combine her irrelevant department with an actually still relevant department, in a bid to maintain corporate power. There is no real business case behind this. Even the article fails to provide any coherent reason for this nonsensical merger.
- everdrive 1y ago
  HR _loves_ using LLMs. If there's a central authority telling them the appropriate way to speak, and the appropriate way to feel, they can't resist it.
  - constantcrying 1y ago
    Moderna is, as the article points out, under a lot of financial pressures. Obviously reducing headcount is a way to reduce spending. I don't think it is unlikely that top management looked at HR and determined the department was far too large for what it did.
cinntaile 1y ago
The head of HR was working closely with their CIO who quit so she was the best fit for the role. The HR department is presumably small so it's no issue to absorb it into tech. The AI spin sounds a bit fake.
- constantcrying 1y ago
  >The HR department is presumably small so it's no issue to absorb it into tech. That is a terrible reason to merge departments. You want people with similar tasks who need to communicate the most be closer together. Putting unrelated people into a department is an easy way to create conflict and dysfunction. >The head of HR was working closely with their CIO who quit so she was the best fit for the role. Very consistently work places where people in important management positions had no clue about what the people under them actually do where the worst places I worked at. At the same time having superiors who understand your work makes communications with them much easier. Having a person with no tech experience leading a tech department is a very easy way to create a terrible tech department.
  - cinntaile 1y ago
    It depends on how they merge it, maybe they merged it in name only. > Having a person with no tech experience leading a tech department is a very easy way to create a terrible tech department. Oh yes, I agree. It sounds like a terrible idea overall.
  - socalgal2 1y ago
    > You want people with similar tasks who need to communicate the most be closer together. I'd shorten that to "You want people who need to communicate the most be closer together." The worst thing to ever happen at a video game company I worked at was when they separated the art department from the programming department. Artist needed to communicate with programmers and visa versa to make the best product. Instead they got siloed by department and the communication went south. Programmers didn't easily learn pain points and needs of artists and artists didn't learn how to use the latest features because communication became harder
    - jfengel 1y ago
      Often, employees need to communicate to two sets of people. The HR people, for example, need to talk to the rank and file employees, and also each other. In house developers talk to IT and to their users. There is an eternal cycle of bringing a function together, then decentralizing it, and repeating. No matter what you do, someone is going to find it convenient and someone else will find it inconvenient.
aspenmayer 1y ago
https://archive.is/0qWXw https://archive.is/0qWXw
nickdothutton 1y ago
Reminder: In large corporations, HR is mostly just a "people risk" department. People are a necessary input, and with them comes all sorts of risk. It is the HR departments job to advise and manage that risk both in general via policy and specifically from case to case. Once you understand HR like that it makes a lot more sense.
- tiahura 1y ago
  One might think about why companies have to spend a disproportionate amount of administrative resources every time an employee grouses?
conartist6 1y ago
I give it six years for them to regret this. At some point, enough of your technical people leaving because they have lost hope for a better future. That is a way that any once-healthy company can die.
- alephnerd 1y ago
  IT and software doesn't generate visible customer-facing value for Moderna - a pharma company the generates revenue through discoverying and selling therapeutics IP. It's like accounting is for them - back office infra that you need to keep the lights on, but nothing else.
  - conartist6 1y ago
    Fun fact, I once worked in just such an IT back office for a pharma. But you're right of course, for them this stuff isn't the product, it's just a infrastructure needed to be able to keep people focused on building the product. I don't follow the logic that undermining that infrastructure is therefore harmless. Stop keeping the lights turned on regularly, and your researchers are unlikely to keep showing up to their jobs. Stop maintaining the IT infra and eventually it will be kludge that makes people hate using it. Stop supporting HR and eventually when your employees need HR they won't trust HR. In any company all the employees know there are two sets of values at play. There's the declared values, which get printed up with nice graphic design, and then there's what the company actually incentivizes and shows that it cares about through its actions. Show through your actions that you don't care (despite saying you do) and people will get the message you say you aren't sending. With these kinds of change-ups the message is "if AI isn't the solution, then you're the problem"
sys_64738 1y ago
Human Resources should really be named Employer Resources as it exists to protect the company from liability for their employees.
- itsoktocry 1y ago
  Is this supposed to be witty or something? Employees are human resources.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - sokoloff 1y ago
    Never forget that “human” is an adjective in that phrase, rather than a noun.
    - s1artibartfast 1y ago
      I literally don't understand how it could be a noun.
      - sokoloff 1y ago
        “Human” is almost always a noun, but isn’t here. The point of that quip is that Human Resources does not focus on the humans as nouns, meaning as humans.
        s1artibartfast 1y ago
        I guess I never saw it that way and struggle to think of example usage as a noun. Human technology, human race, human rights, human error, human nature, human history, human power. Always an adjective. I still cant think of a common noun usage, let alone an alternative noun reading for human resources. People don't say "hello human". It is weird to see comments talking about "HR" as some euphemism or double speak. Maybe I'm the outlier, but I don't understand any other meaning besides managing the resource that is humans. That covers lots of things- managing the liability, procurement, retention, firing, of the workforce. Do people really think "HR" is the resource?
newsclues 1y ago
Sounds like a disaster in waiting.
tkluck 1y ago
Even under the AI-maximalist assumption that human workers and LLMs are going to be interchangeable, I'm having a hard time seeing the logic. LLMs are not going to go on parental leave; have various protected statuses; have worker protection, visa issues or a compensation structure. In other words, there's no synergy at all from having them be managed in the same way as actual human resources. (And I'm sorry for using the term human resources unironically -- that just follows from the AI maximalist assumption.) There's maybe some synergy in workforce planning, but if HR was doing that then there's already something broken in the business. HR is supposed to contribute legal expertise first, cultural and team dynamics expertise second, and process expertise not at all.
alephnerd 1y ago
A lot of people on HN don't seem to realize they might work in a cost center. The best thing you can ever do for your career is try to understand how your job directly generates value for customers in a visible manner. If your job does not, transfer to a team where that does hold, change jobs, or learn how to play politics.
- greesil 1y ago
  Tell me how you feel about R&D
  - alephnerd 1y ago
    Strongly in favor. But it needs to be tied with visible value. For a company like Moderna, software does not generate IP or R&D that can visibly provide customer value. Fundamental research is critical, but needs to be funded by governments because the lead time is long. Ideally, private sector commercial partners are also found to help commercialize fundamentals research once it is shown to be viable in the market as an application. The whole point of innovation and engineering is to find a solution to a problem.
- snowwrestler 1y ago
  In a modern company, every department is a cost center and only the CFO reports profit. This structure is part of Apple’s success, for example. The idea of “cost center” vs “profit center” is an outdated holdover from a Jack-Welch-style conglomerate approach to management where departments are pitted against each other. As the other commenter implies, it’s a great way to starve R&D. It’s also a great way to create silo’d, fractured operations. In contrast, a unified approach to managing the business encourages collaboration and complementary decision making. It also reduces the opportunity for internal politics to distort decisions. Specifically it takes sales out of the driver’s seat, a place they previously accidentally found themselves by virtue of being “the profit center.” I agree that every employee should be able to articulate how their work creates value. But that’s not the same thing as getting out of a “cost center.”
  - 1y ago
karaterobot 1y ago
> The biotech company late last year announced the creation of a new role, chief people and digital technology officer, promoting its human resources chief Tracey Franklin to the spot. I've been wondering recently when boards of directors will realize that the role of CEO might quite acceptably be split into two parts: an executive, who makes decisions to implement a high-level vision based on data and cold-blooded analysis, and (for lack of a better word) a culture head, who is the public face of the company, and keeps relationships with people, and gives inspiring speeches, and so on. The executive part, it seems to me, might quite adequately be replaced by an AI. I don't even mean a hypothetical future AI, I mean literally the level of GPT models we have today. People's response to this is often "but what about genius visionaries like Steve Jobs?" and I admit that they can't be replaced. But, I'm talking about the median CEO, of the median corporation. Or even the bottom 80%, maybe. I don't think that part of their job is safe from AI in the medium term, except by gatekeeping and inertia. I firmly believe AI could do as good a job at that than most CEOs, and better than many, more cheaply, and more predictably. (Everybody else's jobs aren't safe from AI, of course. It's just a matter of AI agents working up the ladder of complexity, from intern-level work, to junior, then senior, and so on. An important assumption here is that the executive part of being a CEO is not particularly difficult, or different from what AI has been shown to excel at already. Just that once the decision maker's job is in danger of being replaced, there will all of a sudden be a lot more skepticism about AI's ability to do human tasks.) The other half of that split, the inspiring networker with amazing soft skills, who is good at driving the company culture and building relationships, would be harder to replace with an AI for the foreseeable future. Because they're not as good at it right now, and because people don't want to be led by a machine. That'll be true for a generation at least, but I imagine that could change as well. Things get normalized, and people's expectations change when their experience changes. What Moderna just did is not what I've described above, but it does feel like a step toward it.
- alephnerd 1y ago
  > I've been wondering recently when boards of directors will realize that the role of CEO might quite acceptably be split into two parts: an executive, who makes decisions to implement a high-level vision based on data and cold-blooded analysis, and (for lack of a better word) a culture head, who is the public face of the company, and keeps relationships with people, and gives inspiring speeches, and so on. This has always been a thing. This is why Chief Product Officer, Chief Operating Officer, Chief of Staff, and other similar roles exist.
lemonwaterlime 1y ago
Who the HR department reports to tells you a lot about the company’s priorities. In most cases, HR reports to the CEO. HR could also report to the CTO, CFO, even the board of directors directly. In this case it seems that HR has shifted from reporting to the CIO to reporting to the CTO. Such a move on its surface could indicate close knit arrangements regarding hiring, technology used by the devs, and even the possibility of HR using more tech to perform their own duties. For instance, there might be more tech savvy people actually doing the screening itself due to close proximity to the tech department. Less siloes could mean better devs get through the early stages of the interview process that could normally be erroneously or prematurely filtered out.
tacker2000 1y ago
“Tech” in this sense means engineers creating internal company tools in order to maximize efficiency, so this is just a cost center, that is building custom LLm tooling. No IP is being built or sold here. Therefore I can understand the approach of combining it with HR in this case, since efficiency also means replacing humans with machines and saving costs there. Now that AI is getting big they can think of more areas where human work is getting superfluous. The question is how far this can go and how much human labor they can turn into LLM responses.
spaceport 1y ago
Having worked in HR as the only tech role in the past, HRIS, I can say w/o doubt this is a low value add move to the tech dept. However the free food stream from temp and external agencies to HR is legit insane and the quality top notch so hopefully they can share with the tech dept Also just to say it if you don't know it, HR is the biggest "rules for thee, not for me" group in your org. Everything bad you have ever imagined, it's worse.
wenc 1y ago
I often see Finance and IT departments merged, usually with the CIO reporting to the CFO or some variant of that. Both Finance and IT are cost centers that manage assets, risks, audit and compliance, and the mindset behind both are similar. Wondering about the overlap between HR and IT however.

38 points by andy99 1y ago

The only thing I can imagine being more hellish than your coworkers being HR people is your coworkers being HR people who use LLMs to do their jobs. This is just guesswork, but I think it is likely that HR came under serious pressure as many of their jobs started to become very obviously obsolete. So the HR chief came up with a plan to combine her irrelevant department with an actually still relevant department, in a bid to maintain corporate power. There is no real business case behind this. Even the article fails to provide any coherent reason for this nonsensical merger.

everdrive 1y ago
HR _loves_ using LLMs. If there's a central authority telling them the appropriate way to speak, and the appropriate way to feel, they can't resist it.
- constantcrying 1y ago
  Moderna is, as the article points out, under a lot of financial pressures. Obviously reducing headcount is a way to reduce spending. I don't think it is unlikely that top management looked at HR and determined the department was far too large for what it did.

cinntaile 1y ago

The head of HR was working closely with their CIO who quit so she was the best fit for the role. The HR department is presumably small so it's no issue to absorb it into tech. The AI spin sounds a bit fake.

constantcrying 1y ago
>The HR department is presumably small so it's no issue to absorb it into tech. That is a terrible reason to merge departments. You want people with similar tasks who need to communicate the most be closer together. Putting unrelated people into a department is an easy way to create conflict and dysfunction. >The head of HR was working closely with their CIO who quit so she was the best fit for the role. Very consistently work places where people in important management positions had no clue about what the people under them actually do where the worst places I worked at. At the same time having superiors who understand your work makes communications with them much easier. Having a person with no tech experience leading a tech department is a very easy way to create a terrible tech department.
- cinntaile 1y ago
  It depends on how they merge it, maybe they merged it in name only. > Having a person with no tech experience leading a tech department is a very easy way to create a terrible tech department. Oh yes, I agree. It sounds like a terrible idea overall.
- socalgal2 1y ago
  > You want people with similar tasks who need to communicate the most be closer together. I'd shorten that to "You want people who need to communicate the most be closer together." The worst thing to ever happen at a video game company I worked at was when they separated the art department from the programming department. Artist needed to communicate with programmers and visa versa to make the best product. Instead they got siloed by department and the communication went south. Programmers didn't easily learn pain points and needs of artists and artists didn't learn how to use the latest features because communication became harder
  - jfengel 1y ago
    Often, employees need to communicate to two sets of people. The HR people, for example, need to talk to the rank and file employees, and also each other. In house developers talk to IT and to their users. There is an eternal cycle of bringing a function together, then decentralizing it, and repeating. No matter what you do, someone is going to find it convenient and someone else will find it inconvenient.

aspenmayer 1y ago

https://archive.is/0qWXw https://archive.is/0qWXw

nickdothutton 1y ago

Reminder: In large corporations, HR is mostly just a "people risk" department. People are a necessary input, and with them comes all sorts of risk. It is the HR departments job to advise and manage that risk both in general via policy and specifically from case to case. Once you understand HR like that it makes a lot more sense.

tiahura 1y ago
One might think about why companies have to spend a disproportionate amount of administrative resources every time an employee grouses?

conartist6 1y ago

I give it six years for them to regret this. At some point, enough of your technical people leaving because they have lost hope for a better future. That is a way that any once-healthy company can die.

alephnerd 1y ago
IT and software doesn't generate visible customer-facing value for Moderna - a pharma company the generates revenue through discoverying and selling therapeutics IP. It's like accounting is for them - back office infra that you need to keep the lights on, but nothing else.
- conartist6 1y ago
  Fun fact, I once worked in just such an IT back office for a pharma. But you're right of course, for them this stuff isn't the product, it's just a infrastructure needed to be able to keep people focused on building the product. I don't follow the logic that undermining that infrastructure is therefore harmless. Stop keeping the lights turned on regularly, and your researchers are unlikely to keep showing up to their jobs. Stop maintaining the IT infra and eventually it will be kludge that makes people hate using it. Stop supporting HR and eventually when your employees need HR they won't trust HR. In any company all the employees know there are two sets of values at play. There's the declared values, which get printed up with nice graphic design, and then there's what the company actually incentivizes and shows that it cares about through its actions. Show through your actions that you don't care (despite saying you do) and people will get the message you say you aren't sending. With these kinds of change-ups the message is "if AI isn't the solution, then you're the problem"

sys_64738 1y ago

Human Resources should really be named Employer Resources as it exists to protect the company from liability for their employees.

itsoktocry 1y ago
Is this supposed to be witty or something? Employees are human resources.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- sokoloff 1y ago
  Never forget that “human” is an adjective in that phrase, rather than a noun.
  - s1artibartfast 1y ago
    I literally don't understand how it could be a noun.
    - sokoloff 1y ago
      “Human” is almost always a noun, but isn’t here. The point of that quip is that Human Resources does not focus on the humans as nouns, meaning as humans.
      - s1artibartfast 1y ago
        I guess I never saw it that way and struggle to think of example usage as a noun. Human technology, human race, human rights, human error, human nature, human history, human power. Always an adjective. I still cant think of a common noun usage, let alone an alternative noun reading for human resources. People don't say "hello human". It is weird to see comments talking about "HR" as some euphemism or double speak. Maybe I'm the outlier, but I don't understand any other meaning besides managing the resource that is humans. That covers lots of things- managing the liability, procurement, retention, firing, of the workforce. Do people really think "HR" is the resource?

newsclues 1y ago

Sounds like a disaster in waiting.

tkluck 1y ago

Even under the AI-maximalist assumption that human workers and LLMs are going to be interchangeable, I'm having a hard time seeing the logic. LLMs are not going to go on parental leave; have various protected statuses; have worker protection, visa issues or a compensation structure. In other words, there's no synergy at all from having them be managed in the same way as actual human resources. (And I'm sorry for using the term human resources unironically -- that just follows from the AI maximalist assumption.) There's maybe some synergy in workforce planning, but if HR was doing that then there's already something broken in the business. HR is supposed to contribute legal expertise first, cultural and team dynamics expertise second, and process expertise not at all.

alephnerd 1y ago

A lot of people on HN don't seem to realize they might work in a cost center. The best thing you can ever do for your career is try to understand how your job directly generates value for customers in a visible manner. If your job does not, transfer to a team where that does hold, change jobs, or learn how to play politics.

greesil 1y ago
Tell me how you feel about R&D
- alephnerd 1y ago
  Strongly in favor. But it needs to be tied with visible value. For a company like Moderna, software does not generate IP or R&D that can visibly provide customer value. Fundamental research is critical, but needs to be funded by governments because the lead time is long. Ideally, private sector commercial partners are also found to help commercialize fundamentals research once it is shown to be viable in the market as an application. The whole point of innovation and engineering is to find a solution to a problem.
snowwrestler 1y ago
In a modern company, every department is a cost center and only the CFO reports profit. This structure is part of Apple’s success, for example. The idea of “cost center” vs “profit center” is an outdated holdover from a Jack-Welch-style conglomerate approach to management where departments are pitted against each other. As the other commenter implies, it’s a great way to starve R&D. It’s also a great way to create silo’d, fractured operations. In contrast, a unified approach to managing the business encourages collaboration and complementary decision making. It also reduces the opportunity for internal politics to distort decisions. Specifically it takes sales out of the driver’s seat, a place they previously accidentally found themselves by virtue of being “the profit center.” I agree that every employee should be able to articulate how their work creates value. But that’s not the same thing as getting out of a “cost center.”
- 1y ago

karaterobot 1y ago

> The biotech company late last year announced the creation of a new role, chief people and digital technology officer, promoting its human resources chief Tracey Franklin to the spot. I've been wondering recently when boards of directors will realize that the role of CEO might quite acceptably be split into two parts: an executive, who makes decisions to implement a high-level vision based on data and cold-blooded analysis, and (for lack of a better word) a culture head, who is the public face of the company, and keeps relationships with people, and gives inspiring speeches, and so on. The executive part, it seems to me, might quite adequately be replaced by an AI. I don't even mean a hypothetical future AI, I mean literally the level of GPT models we have today. People's response to this is often "but what about genius visionaries like Steve Jobs?" and I admit that they can't be replaced. But, I'm talking about the median CEO, of the median corporation. Or even the bottom 80%, maybe. I don't think that part of their job is safe from AI in the medium term, except by gatekeeping and inertia. I firmly believe AI could do as good a job at that than most CEOs, and better than many, more cheaply, and more predictably. (Everybody else's jobs aren't safe from AI, of course. It's just a matter of AI agents working up the ladder of complexity, from intern-level work, to junior, then senior, and so on. An important assumption here is that the executive part of being a CEO is not particularly difficult, or different from what AI has been shown to excel at already. Just that once the decision maker's job is in danger of being replaced, there will all of a sudden be a lot more skepticism about AI's ability to do human tasks.) The other half of that split, the inspiring networker with amazing soft skills, who is good at driving the company culture and building relationships, would be harder to replace with an AI for the foreseeable future. Because they're not as good at it right now, and because people don't want to be led by a machine. That'll be true for a generation at least, but I imagine that could change as well. Things get normalized, and people's expectations change when their experience changes. What Moderna just did is not what I've described above, but it does feel like a step toward it.

alephnerd 1y ago
> I've been wondering recently when boards of directors will realize that the role of CEO might quite acceptably be split into two parts: an executive, who makes decisions to implement a high-level vision based on data and cold-blooded analysis, and (for lack of a better word) a culture head, who is the public face of the company, and keeps relationships with people, and gives inspiring speeches, and so on. This has always been a thing. This is why Chief Product Officer, Chief Operating Officer, Chief of Staff, and other similar roles exist.

lemonwaterlime 1y ago

Who the HR department reports to tells you a lot about the company’s priorities. In most cases, HR reports to the CEO. HR could also report to the CTO, CFO, even the board of directors directly. In this case it seems that HR has shifted from reporting to the CIO to reporting to the CTO. Such a move on its surface could indicate close knit arrangements regarding hiring, technology used by the devs, and even the possibility of HR using more tech to perform their own duties. For instance, there might be more tech savvy people actually doing the screening itself due to close proximity to the tech department. Less siloes could mean better devs get through the early stages of the interview process that could normally be erroneously or prematurely filtered out.

tacker2000 1y ago

“Tech” in this sense means engineers creating internal company tools in order to maximize efficiency, so this is just a cost center, that is building custom LLm tooling. No IP is being built or sold here. Therefore I can understand the approach of combining it with HR in this case, since efficiency also means replacing humans with machines and saving costs there. Now that AI is getting big they can think of more areas where human work is getting superfluous. The question is how far this can go and how much human labor they can turn into LLM responses.

spaceport 1y ago

Having worked in HR as the only tech role in the past, HRIS, I can say w/o doubt this is a low value add move to the tech dept. However the free food stream from temp and external agencies to HR is legit insane and the quality top notch so hopefully they can share with the tech dept Also just to say it if you don't know it, HR is the biggest "rules for thee, not for me" group in your org. Everything bad you have ever imagined, it's worse.

wenc 1y ago

I often see Finance and IT departments merged, usually with the CIO reporting to the CFO or some variant of that. Both Finance and IT are cost centers that manage assets, risks, audit and compliance, and the mindset behind both are similar. Wondering about the overlap between HR and IT however.