Trends Shaping the Future of HR in 2017 | Hacker News Reader

Trends Shaping the Future of HR in 2017

cactushr.com

30 pointsLenaTech15 comments

>we are seeing an increasingly damaging trend – people are still “chasing” more money.

that viewpoint basically summarizes all this HR development.

I fear for the folks coming into the workplace who think that HR exists to be their advocate.

Agreed. For people who don't know, HR is't like "Internal Affairs" like you see in movies, they are employed by the company to do a few things:

1. Create benefit plans. 2. Keep the employer from getting sued.

#2 is particularly important. They are very risk averse, so they will take the quickest path to safety. Post something on social media that someone could take out of context or misinterpret? Fired. Shortest path. Criticize the company or your boss in some way? Fired. Shortest path. Say something overheard by someone else that might offend them? Fired. Shortest path. A potential hire says something odd to the HR manager during an interview? Denied, to risky.

Something funny, at a company I worked for years ago, HR created a questionnaire to gauge morale in the company compared to other software companies. Every department was well below the average (meaning low morale) except the HR department which was well above.

Beware.

I couldn't agree more with your comment. I've seen too many people fall into the trap of believing that the HR department is there to protect them, only to find out much too late that the reality is as you described.

about 10 years ago i was assigned to a project to build some in-house HR software which required me to interact with quite a few on the HR Team (the dev team, both of us, even moved our desks into their area) for about four months.

aside from one or two benefits administrators, the rest were "HR generalists" and none of them had any discernible skills whatever. And lazy...not a single HR function that they hadn't outsourced. With almost no experience or skill requirement to limit the pool of applicants, the competition for HR jobs is clearly high and incumbents were terrified at doing anything which might jeopardize their job. As far as i could tell, this fear determined nearly all of their day-to-day interaction.

HR, particularly in banks, is not to be trusted.

There would be problems with a 100% gig economy, but HR wouldn't be one of them.

I wonder. Every internet resource states that HR is there to look out for the company, not for you (well, for themselves, to be precise). Maybe people coming in who act as if HR is working for them are actually playing more elaborate mindgames than we can understand?

Ctrl-F "team"...

Actually, fewer matches than I might have guessed, but even so there seems to be a great deal here about teams and interactions and very little about letting smart individuals get on with things in private spaces.

we've just seen it in the hardware - horizontal scaling, a huge number of well connected commodity elements beat standalone super-servers for most practical purposes and metrics. So, now we going to do that with human "wetware" too, and HR glamorizes itself as Kubernetes (with original system suitably called Borg at Google) in that brave new world.

> So, now we suppose that would work for human "wetware" too

Why do you think it wouldn't?

It's not out of the question that they might. Although there's a countervailing view that humans motivated by passion perform better -- perhaps dramatically better -- than those who feel like cogs in a machine.

Either way, it's an important issue for people who hope to find a working environment where they feel satisfied (which, to be clear, might for different people mean a preference for teamwork, solo-work, or perhaps some of each).

> Although there's a countervailing view that humans motivated by passion perform better -- perhaps dramatically better -- than those who feel like cogs in a machine.

I'm not sure that matters much. If it delivers more to the bottom line to treat people like cogs so that the org is more scalable, then that's probably what will happen.

In modern distributed systems, we've de-emphasized vertical scalability (in our analogy, an individual's motivation and performance) to improve horizontal scalability, fault tolerance, flexibility, etc. It sucks to admit, but if your organization needs those kind of scaling characteristics, then treating your employees like cogs may be the most profitable organizational structure.

>Why do you think it wouldn't?

i restated as i had used 'suppose' in the sense that we aren't there yet. And in some sense there is no question whether it will work or not - it is just our future and so it "will happen" instead of "will work"

Interesting. Most of the "trends" have made similar lists for years (e.g., teams). However, #8 on working together with a greater sense of purpose seems to capture the current zeitgeist pretty well.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com