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Comment by sandino | Hacker News Reader

The only support I received as the victim of my manager’s abuse was encouragement to take advantage of medical leave.

This statement is quite telling: first HR goes to lengths to deny that there's any seriously wrong. Then they pretty blatantly acknowledge that yes, things are so fucked up that you'll likely want to take medical leave.

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From first-hand experience, I cannot stress this enough: HR's job is to protect management. Period. Full stop.

Having going through this type of situation (high-performer until on the wrong side of someone in management), I really didn't understand things until someone pointed something out. I was asked: who hired the manager? The purpose of a manager is to handle the details of the goals of hirer.

A musician hires a manager to handle the details book gigs, vet contracts, etc. If the musician doesn't like the work being done, the manager is fired. If the manager thinks he or she can get a better result from someone else, they fire the assistants, caterers, etc. The musician doesn't care, only that results are generated.

The senior execs hire managers for the exact same purpose: deal with the details to get projects completed for them. If you play ball, you'll get the rewards. Mess with that agenda, you'll get canned.

The biggest disappointment I had was how I was treated. They make you feel like it's you letting them down. They dangle in front of you all the ways out: "we're inclusive, we want to you have a great work environment, we have these resources for you to grow". And, I was there for all of it: the manager who would tell you exactly how to handle things only to lie in a HR meeting the exact opposite.

The big hint should be the HR title: Human Resources. A resource is explored, extracted, and exhausted. HR's job is provide for management, not the employees.

It’s the human resource’s department’s job to protect the company from liability. If they’re not protecting the company from renegade managers they’re not doing a very good job.

What makes you think the managers are being renegades? They know the company details that you don't know: we have too many women claiming maternity benefits, we have too many people with skill X and not enough Y, etc. Again, HR's job is to handle the needs of senior management, and only until then will HR act against a manager.

Your hypothesis is extraordinarily unlikely. Google has continuously expanded benefits for men and women going on parental leave over these last years. It would make no sense whatsoever for them to also systematically harass pregnant women out of the workforce. If they were concerned about the costs of maternity, they could just have expanded those benefits more slowly. That would have had dramatically more impact, at less cost, than harassing a woman here or a woman there out.

Expanding benefits while simultaneously harassing those who take them gives the benefit of virtue signalling with less of the cost. Most people who receive harassment keep it to themselves as to be public about it is generally a career ender.

I'm not saying we can't concoct a series of words that makes it seem likely, if you suppose that all the evidence that you would otherwise expect is absent because of flimsy reasons. I'm saying that the balance of the evidence suggests that this is not part of any systematic policy, but rather an intermittent failure of a kind that one would expect given a sufficiently long timeline, even in an organization with the best of intentions.

To the extent that there systemic anti-maternity bias within Google, it is certainly below the background rate of society as a whole. That's not a very high bar to clear, so I'll go further to say that Google is actively supportive of parenting and maternity in a way that few other organizations in the United States are. I can say that as someone whose spouse has had two kids there, and as someone whose teammates have had dozens of kids between them during our time working together.

Even with that, failures like these occur, because that's just what people are like, and we have not designed perfect systems to counter this type of behavior. That's not to excuse -- if the story is accurate, figurative heads should roll. And our systems should be improved.

But positing a systematic policy of abuse like this is cynical and doesn't fit with the evidence. Doing so is less like extrapolating a line from a single data point and more like drawing an entire picture from that point.

There is no need for it to be a systematic policy, it can easily be an emergent behavior. Such behaviors are common when there are conflicting objectives. It's human nature. Good luck fighting that.

No one is saying that Google is engaging in "systematic" harassment here.

But it may very well be that they are willfully (or simply incompetently) turning a blind eye in this one particular case.

That is exactly what the person I was replying to suggested. If the managers who harass aren't renegades, then the harassment is systematic, by definition.

I have to agree. I learned the hard way that HR is not there to deal with grievances fairly. Their job isn't to shield employees from bad behaviour or absurd demands from management. Their job is to help and protect management.

Unions are the ppl there to protect employees from abuse, not HR.

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