5 ms·
Your company, your coworkers, are not your friends. HR is not there for you, it's to protect the company from you. Do not disclose personal information to those
by reactordev 2mo ago
Your company, your coworkers, are not your friends. HR is not there for you, it's to protect the company from you. Do not disclose personal information to those who control your livelihood. Once you leave or if you build up a personal relationship with a coworker, outside of work, then maybe. Even still. I will never divulge what I have been through simply because corporate wants to be "inclusive".
- anderber 2mo agoExactly this. No matter how they dress it up, HR is there to protect the company, not you.
- s1artibartfast 2mo agoGenuine question. Can you tell me why people love saying this so much?
- xquce 2mo agoBecause HR lies and say the opposite in the majority of companies. "Come to us with any problems, it's safe and anonymous, we are here to help you". From personal experience I have reported gross treats by senior leadership to an HR rep who was shocked about hearing their HR employee evals being suppressed by only allowing score between 8-10 in a 1-10 score. The HR rep confirmed it personally that it was happening and a few months later appeared on the other side of the desk with the leadership as they fired me for budget reasons.
- kakacik 2mo agoThis is corporate default. Don't stick your head too much, don't make too much noise, vent off someplace else ie via some cool sports. Doesn't matter how righteous, how correct and good for the company, it will very easily back fire you. Its kafquesque catch-22 all over the place, be a good boy and accept the paycheck with crap it comes along. Or move, but its not always greener on the next site.
- reactordev 2mo agoThere are no more patches of green grass left.
- xquce 2mo agoJust to add a followup to my story. If you can't find it, find people and create it! What I did was to build my own grass field(started company with my team) and it has been fucking great. We made a better product and made enough of a name of ourselves, that while I lost the battle that time with the former leadership, I fought long enough to see them all lose their jobs. As a CEO myself now, I choose not to have an HR rep and try to do better for my people. Also this is in EU so as a warning to others,like me then, who thought HR in the US could do this but not here.
- vdomi 2mo agoHR stands for Human Resources, as in how the company manages ones of its resources, the humans. Is this not obvious at all?
- s1artibartfast 2mo agoI agree. If it is so obvious, why do people like saying it? Do they also go around repeating the sky is blue?
- bgilroy26 2mo ago>The phrase appeared in print in the 1885 biography of the noted swindler Joseph "Hungry Joe" Lewis, "King of the Bunco Men". The author writes: >>It was always a saying with Joe that there was a sucker born every minute, and all through his business career he acted on that basis, and generally found a good crop of them
- andrewaylett 2mo agoEven if the people working in HR genuinely want to do the right thing for the employees, and company policies support them doing that, interactions with HR are inherently adversarial. The people within HR may be friendly, they've probably got friends :). It can be a very people-oriented role. But they are incapable of being your friend when you're interacting with them in their role as representative for the company. I greatly appreciate my employer's HR folk, they're really lovely, very good at their jobs, and want to help. But if I have to have a formal meeting with them, I would definitely bring along my union rep.
- reactordev 2mo agoEntirely this. When you are interacting with HR, that person on the other side is trying to protect the company from whatever claims you are about to make.
- andrewaylett 2mo agoAny claims are irrelevant to the inherent adversarial nature of the role, which comes from the authority they wield. Edit: which also means you're not wrong, if you've got claims that trigger damage control then HR are even less your friend.
- mlrtime 2mo agoWork as a Manager in a large tech org and you will see very quickly how the company operates (HR / HRBP). The higher you go up the quicker you see that employees aren't looked at as people, but as numbers or dollars. My first manager job I was very naive, I went to HR to get help with directs. It was a bad idea, it put me and my direct at risk... never again. The sad truth is that the managers who actually care and want to solve problems for people (personal and technical) usually get the wrong end of the HR stick first.
- s1artibartfast 2mo agoI am a manager. I have those conversations regularly (its my job). I have had tough conversations about if we should burn out an entire team or not, likely losing them, so i get it. My question was not about if it is true or not, but why people like saying it so much.
- 9x39 2mo agoNobody else bit, so I think it's a shared bitterness that unifies a naive group who challenged someone with real power through HR and lost. Through multitudes of anecdotes, this group often apparently holds that conflict could be solved by going around someone, their supervisor, say, and invoking HR as if they had authority over the situation and would obviously correct the injustice. Having misplayed their hand, they end up feeling victimized through organizational discipline or firing and abandoned by the would-be savior HR. With the moral injury now upon them, they tell everyone this warning as if it were a great lie to be exposed. Our bosses tend to be the primary relationship to manage in organizations. Just the way power works, and it mostly poses a problem when one party doesn't realize it and thinks relationships are optional.
- reactordev 2mo agopeople say it often because people don't learn the lesson. The messaging is human centric and there to make it sound like they are there for you. They aren't.
- 2mo ago
- iwontberude 2mo ago[flagged]
- UncleMeat 2mo agoWhile this isn't necessarily true at the individual level, HR as an institution is this way. The first HR departments were developed to defuse feminist agitation against sexist workplace environments at Sears.
- yifanl 2mo agoThey have authority over you, therefore all interactions must be taken under that context.
- _dark_matter_ 2mo agoThis is so sad. I have made amazing friends with my colleagues in the past. My days are made better when they can be funny, we can share moments, and we can support each other in hard times. Even remotely I have managed to stay in touch with them. It is a real friendship, built from a decade of learning just how this other person ticks. Really hope I didn't have to ever give that up.
- reactordev 2mo agoYou can make friends but don’t assume that they are simply because you share a common trauma of being cooped up in the same building. I’ve made friends at work. I wouldn’t call them friend friends but I’ve made friends at work.
- joenot443 2mo agoI think if you consider your job a form of trauma then any judgements you have on it will be downstream of that.
- reactordev 2mo agoEverything is a form of trauma. Jobs are just notorious for it.
- crossroadsguy 2mo agoI was rejected in a hiring process because a co-worker worked there. They asked him for feedback in the final hiring decision. I was being considered for a senior staff role. The meeting room had two of my ex-co-workers. One was the person who had referred me and was my tech lead at a previous work place. This (feedback giver) co-worker (my peer; from yet another work place) told them all was great and hunky dory but "he is a work life balance kind of person". I was not hired. Also, my two co-workers there didn't know each other really and didn't know they both had worked with me in the past until that meeting. Company had connected those dots on LinkedIn.
- ido 2mo agoSounds like you dodged a bullet and the coworker did you a favor.
- p1anecrazy 2mo agoGood riddance. A “work-life balance kind of person” is not a negative characteristic; even more so at a position where your behavior is an inspiration to many people
- crossroadsguy 2mo agoWell, I live in India. “Being available” and making others do the same is the national managerial obsession.
- tesnorindian 2mo agoPeople should reject this mentality and live their life.
- reactordev 2mo agoTheir GDP would suffer.
- ocschwar 2mo agoWhich is why I am sitting right now in a meeting and the presenter is logged in from Bangalore and I don't even want to know what `TZ=Asia/Kolkata date` will tell me.
- aljgz 2mo agoThis is a recipe for a sad life. It's avoiding friendship for the fear of betrayal. You get a lot of benefits by being good friends with colleagues. There are, however important things to be aware of: 1- "Though shall not" limit their social life to their colleagues (or any single group that can disappear with a divorce, change of jobs, or hobby, maybe because of an incident). 2- "Though shall not" blindly help people with the hope of being helped in return. Help with generosity, but know the limits: don't sacrifice yourself, and certainly, don't count on people returning the favor as your main plan. It's incredible how much happier we can be just by helping people, if we fire and forget, rather than cling onto. 3- Do not define yourself with your job, your success in there, or with your colleagues' approvals. This is extremely hard, yet extremely important. Diversify what defines you. Be able to mentally afford being bad at some of them. Don't let any of them define who you are. This lets you act with true confidence (not insecurity disguised as overconfidence), which is extremely pleasant for yourself and others.
- ricksunny 2mo ago#2 I believe that there is at least one entire culture on the planet that comports itself this way, whose emergent macro outcomes can be debated.
- aljgz 2mo agoInteresting... Can you elaborate? I did not get the reference.
- kunley 2mo agoDisagree. It's just admitting that the company can and will be cynical when it comes to the conflict of interests between them and the employee. Making friends at the workplace is fine until there is such conflict, then where will they stand? If they will turn they back on you (and most of them will), then how much is such relation worth in the first place?
- aljgz 2mo agoHow's that different from friends at your sports club? How does the risk of your workplace friends not taking your side balance against the benefit of the possibility that they will support you? Should I give up years of joy and sense of community and belonging for the fear that someday my workplace friends will betray me? And then years more of suffering in my next workplace? A strategy that minimizes risk rarely maximizes reward.
- shimman 2mo agoNever been in an office where there wasn't some solidarity amongst workers and not the owners. I can't imagine how alienating it must be to work somewhere you feel you can't trust anyone except yourself, sounds like a self made hell. At least you get paid I suppose.
- jamesfinlayson 2mo agoYeah I agree. I'm still very careful who I trust but it doesn't hurt to try and build a network.
- trismus 2mo agoIs this your life? Quit.
- reactordev 2mo agoYou first
- s1artibartfast 2mo agoSounds like a fate worse than getting fired. Do people not know how to make friends and develop trust. The solution is the same judgment process any human should go through. Only an idiot would automatically assume coworkers are friends. Only an idiot would assume coworkers can't become friends.
- energy123 2mo agoThe workplace is one of the best places to find your spouse. It's where you spend most of your time and where you're most likely to meet someone with similar interests to you in the same location. It's anti-human to treat the workplace as this clinical saferoom with no relationships.
- mfru 2mo agoWorkplaces that are dictated by a boss or C-suite are anti-human as well, as they are dictatorial, not democratic.
- alpineman 2mo agoIf I were so terrified I couldn't share anything personal at work, I would be happy to be fired as it sounds like a miserable place to work
- reactordev 2mo agoYou can share all you want, and you will be judged for it.
- reactordev 2mo agoI heard this from older generations. Sadly this is no longer true as we all work remotely now.
- dozerly 2mo ago[flagged]
- reactordev 2mo agoI take the defensive sarcasm as confirmation of my position.
- dozerly 2mo agoWouldn’t say it was defensive, I just doubt that you’re a fun guy to work with if you treat everyone around you in a corporate environment as hostile entities that are seeking to destroy you. You can have friends that are coworkers. Relationships can exist outside of a coworking relationship.
- reactordev 2mo agonot being a friend does not automatically make one an enemy. Actively sabotaging projects and meetings does. Telling me, without knowing me, that I'm not a fun guy to work with simply because I say corporate america is not on your side is exactly the kind of mentality that makes me restate my position on it. Relationships exists at all levels. Not all relationships have to be parental or day-camp style bffs.
- tancop 2mo agohr and corporate are always your enemies but coworkers can be friends. they are on the same level as you and dealing with the same problems. just be careful who you trust because some of them might turn out to be class traitors and make up some allegations to get you fired.
- reactordev 2mo agocoworkers are your competition for that promotion though, how do you reconcile being someone's friend when they are your enemy? This is how corporate america thinks. I don't but the vast majority of seniors I know are trying to get to principal and there's only so many slots.