9 ms·

Improving a company 101: * Get rid of HR people. * Profit.

• ludoo 13y ago
  Heh, I agreed with this, clicked on the karma icon, then read the author's name... ofc.... ciao salvo!
  • gringofyx 13y ago
    Same here, humbled
  • tbarbugli 13y ago
    same here :D
• exDM69 13y ago
  Only once have I had a job where I was interviewed by a HR person. The whole interview made me feel uneasy, but I took the job anyway. I should have trusted my instincts and rejected the job, on the grounds that they put HR people to interview engineers with silly questions. The job, and the working environment in particular, was horrible and I didn't stay after my probation period. On the other hand, I was put on a dead end project and the company, despite being a rather small one, was like a big corporation where you can hide without doing anything and still get paid. I actually read a few thousand pages of Intel programming manuals and wrote not one but two toy operating system projects and got paid for it!
  • jacquesm 13y ago
    There was an article posted about someone that worked for a large corporation and they forgot about him but continued to pay him for years. At the time I thought it was a hoax, after your story I'm not so sure. https://sites.google.com/site/forgottenemployee/ https://sites.google.com/site/forgottenemployee/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6087935 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6087935
    • Blahah 13y ago
      It was a hoax, but there are plenty of true stories in the same vein. What sets the parent's true story apart is that the protagonist did something productive with the time he had been given, whereas in the story you linked, the guy spends his days wasting away.
      • JonnieCache 13y ago
        Here's another fun one, which was also posted here: http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/The-Firing-Offense.aspx http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/The-Firing-Offense.aspx
    • deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]
• hrvbr 13y ago
  Well, developers can hire other developers, but we can't easily hire the accountants, lawyers and others (including HR, ironically). The big question is: how do we hire people from a field we're not competent in? But yes, at my last job interview, I succeeded at the technical interview but failed at the 'personality' one. It's a loss for them, not for me.
  • marcosdumay 13y ago
    > we can't easily hire the accountants, lawyers and others What makes you think HR people are any better than we in hiring those ones? (Hiring other HR personal excluded, they are probably good on that, the same way that we are good on hiring techies.) I don't have an answer to your question, but I'm quite confident that it isn't "you ask a psychologist".
• Xylakant 13y ago
  I respectfully disagree. Get some decent HR people and don't give them the last call on hiring decisions. Make it clear that HR is supporting the process, but not leading the process and that the last call is with the department/team that is looking for a hire. Let HR take all the tedious tasks of hiring from the developers, such as all the legalese, handling employee benefits, sick reports and all associated paperwork, but do not let them define the flow of a hiring process. Developer time is far to valuable to be wasted on mainly administrative side-tasks.
  • Retric 13y ago
    Be careful, if HR screens resumes then they effectivly have a last call on highering decisions by rejecting people before anyone else sees them. From what I have seen the only useful function for HR in the highering process is a background verification check. Aka did John Smith work at your company from 2000-2004. Anything else is risky.
    • RougeFemme 13y ago
      I agree that HR can screen out some otherwise qualified people. I've seen that from both sides. But I think that if the criteria you provide to HR are sufficiently broad and high-level, they can be helpful. If the candidate clearly has no relevant (as defined by the hiring team/manager) education or experience, HR doesn't need to send that one down.
      • hackula1 13y ago
        I think the worry would be that HR will miss a lot of people with relevant experience. "Oh, John Smith only has experience in C#, but we need someone with experience in .Net".
        • Xylakant 13y ago
          A partial solution to that is a better briefing and education for the HR team. Another partial solution is to make the selection criteria broader. Make clear that they should include the candidate when in doubt. But if for example you're looking for a team lead for an important project, you can certainly specify requirements that the HR team can handle, such as "must have 5 years of work experience. Must have team lead experience." etc.
• robin2 13y ago
  I once had a job at a software company where an HR manager was hired to introduce a new "Performance Management" system, where people were scored on their "behavioural competencies" and "technical competencies". I learned from my line manager (before he quit) that the HR manager regarded behavioural competencies as more important than technical competencies, because anything technical could be picked up on a week's training course. (She also didn't understand the difference between a qualification and a certificate that you get for having attended a training course.) Now, I'm just a software engineer, but I can't really get my head around the idea a software company hiring lots of supposedly smart people, subjecting them to this sort of nonsense, and then make it obligatory to take it seriously. To me, that sounds like a recipe for trouble.
  • jacques_chester 13y ago
    > To me, that sounds like a recipe for trouble. You are correct. It is demonstrably going to lead to bad outcomes: http://www.dorsethouse.com/books/mmpo.html http://www.dorsethouse.com/books/mmpo.html
• mathattack 13y ago
  I disagree very much. There are many bad HR people, and many HR people who are given bad direction. It's very hard to imagine a company of over 30 or 40 people surviving without one. Is the CEO supposed to be up on all the HR rules? Is the CEO out in the market calibrating salaries every day? Does the CEO have time to analyze optimal organization designs? Should the CEO do all the initial fit screens? Chase down background checks? If HR is an issue, it's because they're being asked to do the wrong thing, or the individual is incompetent. Saying "We don't need HR because they are poor technical interviewers" is like saying "We don't need accountants because I don't like the expense report form." You still need accountants, and you still need HR.
  • einhverfr 13y ago
    > Does the CEO have time to analyze optimal organization designs? Optimal for what? I do think the CEO or someone similar needs to figure out what you want from the organization and design it. HR may have input but it is just input. HR can do the market calibration research. That's a good role for them. Initial fit? That should be the team or team manager. Background checks? Either HR or an administrative assistant somewhere. Without HR, that work should fall upon the team manager and maybe some assistance somewhere. It can be done though. Bottom line, yes, there is a role for HR, I think. No, I don't think it is a big role.
    • Xylakant 13y ago
      Short question: Do you have employees? We do have a handful and the amount of work associated with them [1] is astounding. On average it used to cost me 20% of my time until we hired someone for administrative and HR work. Now, we're a small company and have no need for a full HR position, but that role is taken by a person and I can quite well tell that the more employees we hire, the more we'll move to a dedicated HR position. It's not a "big" role, but it's still an important one. I value that work being taken off me. [1] paperwork, monthly company events, ...
      • einhverfr 13y ago
• Spooky23 13y ago
  Step 3: Grow, and attract some parasitic employees Step 4: Lose a trivial discrimination / disability / wrongful termination suit because you didn't keep the right paperwork.
  • alan_cx 13y ago
    Trivial? I've seen business go bust as a result of this sort of negligence. BTW, suing for wrong doing is NOT parasitic. Its often the only recourse avaliable with bad employers
    • Spooky23 13y ago
      The point I was trying to make was that with a good, professional HR folks, your company will avoid stupid mistakes that can become very expensive when dealing with an employee who knows how to work the system to their advantage. One of the folks who worked for me several years back had complaints filed against her by an employee whom she had woken up from a dead sleep during the day a few times. (The employee was working from 6-2AM as a night clerk at a hotel) The employee claimed that although the supervisor had 5 employees, she only checked his sleep/wake status, and did so because he was a member of a protected class. (Yes, really) This nonsense required administrative hearings with the human rights commission/eeoc and untold gobs of paperwork. The HR people saved the day, and were able to use the good processes that they had in place to keep an awful situation from getting worse.
      • hobs 13y ago
        Also to make an unfair point, that's Canada for you.
    • happimess 13y ago
      I believe Spooky meant "trivially avoided" rather than "resulting in trivial damage."
  • gnu8 13y ago
    Companies should lose discrimination / disability / wrongful termination lawsuits. HR's purpose is to get businesses off the hook for these crimes. Maybe you're thinking about it as an actual or theoretical startup owner, where you don't want to get in trouble. I can understand that. But people are more important than businesses and any business that abuses people deserves to be shut down.
• RougeFemme 13y ago
  Profit. . .until you consider the money paid out in lawsuits (discrimination, illegal firings, etc.) that could have been avoided by HR. . .or the money wasted paying for expensive benefits vendors that could have been saved by HR. . .or the turnover that could've been saved by HR though intervention with some particularly bad managers/management teams (who HR had no hand in hiring). Granted, this is only true of decent - or better - HR departments, but I've seen them.
• alan_cx 13y ago
  So, no bad programmers, drivers, receptionists, sales people, accountants........ just HR people. Dunno what HR does in the US, but here in the UK I know a lot of cases where a decent HR person would have saved companies millions in payouts to now ex-employees who sued them. In several cases, the business was made bankrupt, jobs lost. Keep HR people Keep business Edit: Format.
• SatvikBeri 13y ago
  Keep in mind you see strong selection bias. First, you only hear about extremely good or extremely bad cases. Second, on a site like Hacker News, you're more likely to hear about the bad HR departments. Most HR people are at least somewhat competent and help the company, and good HR people are worth their weight in silver. When Human Resources actually understands the needs of the employees and is able to enact policies that make them happier, that's extraordinarily useful.
• rwallace 13y ago
  On the contrary, it's not the personnel department in this case that needed firing, it's the senior management. The personnel department performs a necessary function in dealing with the legal nightmares that come with hiring people. They must not, however, be given authority over who to hire and fire. Senior management, in giving the personnel department such authority, botched their own job.
  • timv 13y ago
    They must not, however, be given authority over who to hire and fire It's not obvious to me that this is what actually happened here. I worked for many years at an organisation that had a similar policy - if I wanted to hire someone that the psych evaluation had flagged as no-hire, then I needed the approval of my boss's boss. HR didn't invent that policy on their own. They recommended it to the CEO/Management Team because they saw the number of bad hires that were coming up where the hiring manager ignored the psych eval and then all the issues that the eval predicted came true. I didn't love the rule - particularly when the issue was something like this person you're trying to hire for a relatively boring entry level role doesn't have a lot of ambition or initiative - but it was a specific response to an identified problem. Perhaps the wrong response, perhaps not, I'm still not sure. But what it wasn't, was an HR dept that set their own rules. Their authority was purely to enforce the CEO's decisions on hiring policy. Because the author of this article doesn't seem to know much about the origin/nature of the policy in his organisation, it's hard to tell whether he ran into the CEO's rule, or HR's rule. The decision to give the test in English to someone who wasn't a native English speaker is a mistake, but it might be the candidate's mistake. My organisation gave candidates the choice of language in which to take the test, and strongly advised them to take it in their native language. Every so often we'd see someone who didn't listen to that (possibly because they didn't want us to think that they weren't confident in their english skills) and it showed. Based on the information provided in the blog post, I'm still not sure whether the wrong decision was made or not. There were clearly mistakes in the process, but we don't know who made them, and there's no way to know whether the psych eval was accurate or not since the hire never went ahead.
• gvb 13y ago
  The problem with departments named "Human Resources" is that employees are not resources and they resent the dehumanization of being treated as such. All the HR horror stories have the same thread: they are dehumanizing employees. In my limted experience this is much more of a problem in big companies than small. In small companies, employees know each other as fellow human beings from the owner to the interns. In big companies, the humans are numbers in a computer to be ranked, graded, and filed yearly.
  • VLM 13y ago
    I worked at a small telco (couple hundred people) long ago where HR saw themselves as providing "Resources for Humans" (as opposed to the physical plant guy who could replace lightbulbs all day but couldn't help figure out your health insurance) They had their nose pretty deep in payroll operations; we were always paid correctly and on time. Insurance problems? They'd help. They were frankly pretty decent service providers for us. Unfortunately this is extremely rare in corporate life.
  • drdeadringer 13y ago
    In Verner Vinge's "Deepness in the Sky" there's a [Human] culture with a filled position called "Director of Human Resources". In the context of that book, that title and position has about as happy undertones as if you were to watch 'The Matrix' and then hear Chevron's advertisement blurb: "Human Energy".
• theorique 13y ago
  HR performs some useful functions though - administration of healthcare, benefits, and retirement plans are some things that come to mind. If they needlessly block good hires, that's a bad thing, but I'd rather not be responsible for dealing with administering my own pension or benefits.
• eli 13y ago
  There's no reason HR has to be involved in hiring decisions at all. I wish my startup could afford to have an HR person to administer health benefits, run payroll, track receipts, and so on.
• bguthrie 13y ago
  There are two things driving policies like this. First, personal interviews can be poor predictors of future hire performance. People will often hire someone who resonates on a personal level, or who is otherwise charismatic, rather than for the right skillset. Standardized tests, administered correctly, are one way of reducing the variability. And variability is pain. Your HR and hiring people are likely being judged just the way everyone else is. Hiring, or forcing dev teams to interview, a lot of low-quality candidates without an effective screen is a good way to find yourself being replaced. The second is that, as people are fond of saying, the standard you walk past is the standard you accept. This is the source of a lot of foolish "musts"––candidates must have a certain GPA, or only go to a certain school, or they have to hit a certain percentage on some tests. Having standards is all well and good until you find a case that doesn't fit your profile and you either get flexible or look foolish. Being flexible means that other hires complain that you're lowering your standards, and no one likes hearing that either. The test in this case wasn't correctly administered, as columbo pointed out elsewhere, and I agree that hiring managers shouldn't have a veto over technical hires. But this is the sort of human-dynamics problem that can't be solved by firing entire departments. If you don't address the problem head-on it'll just come back next year in a different form.
• Tycho 13y ago
  There's a lot more to HR than just recruitment.
• TheSOB88 13y ago
  Can't tell if this is sincere, or just a summary of what everyone else has said. Probably sincere, I guess.