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Comment by logfromblammo | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

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