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Comment by kmlx | Hacker News Reader

> The city and the Office of Chief Medical Examiner said Monday that the settlement did not mean that Ms. Stajic was treated inappropriately. In pretrial papers, its directors had argued that there had been some unrelated concerns over how she managed her laboratory.

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I suspect that parallel construction is very common in situations where management wants someone fired for illegal reasons.

I think I'd need to see the results of an independent investigation before reaching any conclusions in this case.

I've seen it happen both ways (at least I think it was) where someone with a legit problem claimed they were fired for X when ... naw man you really were terrible at Y.

At the same time I've kinda suspected about situations where someone was let go that the "reasons" appeared after another situation occurred and that made me wonder.

Really hard to know. I agree an outside investigation would really be the only route to try to find out.

I reported my boss to HR based on his inappropriate behavior (with other employees at the company). I was put into the next round of layoffs. Needless to say I don't trust HR anymore.

If you are ever in a situation where you feel as though you need to report something to HR, hire an attorney and have them do it for you.

If you feel like that would be overkill, don't report anything to HR. They don't work for you; they are not on your side; they will never be on your side.

If it is an issue that could be criminal, hire an attorney and have them tell the cops, without letting HR know about it first. Internal whistleblower programs are probably a trap.

In short, nobody should trust HR, ever, except the board and CEO.

> They don't work for you; they are not on your side; they will never be on your side.

But they're not on the manager's side either. What rational HR department would want to keep a manager who makes their subordinates feel unsafe, work ineffectively, etc?

Basically every single one. Best recent example is probably the shit Uber got into a few years back.

An HR department whose mandate is to limit legal damage to the company at the lowest possible cost. That is to say, all of them. Unfortunately, it's usually easier and less legally dangerous to push a low level employee who has a grievance than it is to terminate a higher-level one who's misbehaving.

That is a high risk strategy.

Sure, it might work most of the time. But the one time it doesn't work, could cause billions of dollars in damages.

Just look at what happened to Uber after they retaliated against the wrong "low level" employee.

> What rational HR department would want to keep a manager who makes their subordinates feel unsafe, work ineffectively, etc.?

Any of them, because:

(1) The manager is more likely to know their legal rights,

(2) The manager is more likely to be able to afford the cost of litigation in a dispute,

(3) The manager is more likely to have a contract beyond at-will employment,

(4) Determining whether the manager is a problem or the employee is malingering has a cost, plus risks creating evidence of corporate liability

Etc.

Except in the most clear and egregious cases, HR is naturally aligned with management against the human resources that management manages; that's kind of the point of HR, whose function is to assist management in efficiently (i.e., at minimum cost per unit value produced) managing those the human resources.

HR is not a neutral referee; the closest there is to that is government labor relations authorities.

HR doesn’t see it that way; they only see current situation: the immediate two-person conflict between employee and manager. In this isolated case, it’s always less politically risky to stand with the manager against the lowly employee. Now copy and repeat this process for every single subsequent case, even against the same manager; it’s always less politically risky in each isolated case to rule against the employee. This is therefore a sufficient explanation for why the HR department behaves like it does.

I don't think a lot of people realize that HR is never there to defend you--its sole purpose is protect the company from legal liability.

Abusive managers are a significant legal liability. In what way are the people who report them a liability?

> In what way are the people who report them a liability?

Because they reported them. The rest of the employees are not reporting anything, and are therefore not a problem for HR to be dealt with. The conflict is between the reporting employee and the manager, who has more political capital. Therefore, HR sides with the manager to minimize risks to itself.

If you have an abusive manager, the best thing you can do is find out if the behavior is illegal, and change jobs. You could hire an attorney to see if any laws were broken, and if they were, likely receive some respite through the legal system. If the behavior was not illegal, there's not much else that you can really do. A few rare companies might have systems in place that rectify the behavior of abusive managers, but that's probably incredibly rare. HR is never there to help you. It's likely best to keep them out of the loop in all these matters.

Is this an undefeatable weapon? It seems governments and bosses have "7 things they can hang you for" against anybody. Or Malicious Compliance wouldn't be a working striking strategy. What could go wrong with:

1. Accuser must provide evidence that deviations indicate worst case behaviour, not normal procedure, after researching similar staff members 2. No suing for deviations and law violations known by bosses 3. Prevent counter suing and prioritizing the suit of less powerful

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