HR is not your friend, and other things I think you should know

Maybe it's because I grew up poor or because I think things are too good in tech and about to crash any day.

My antidote? $100k in liquidity. Preferably not invested in the NASDAQ.

If tech crashes, you can take your liquid $100k and move to Thailand, Spain, Portugal, Turkey, etc. In these countries, you can live well for a decade, sometimes even thirteen years off just $100,000 USD.

I know $100k isn't much and it certainly isn't the $1M - $3M people want for retirement in the US. But it's enough to have peace of mind.

A career is a story we use to guide how we look for work and to convince people to pay us for our work.

The important thing is to not let an employer define you career story, even if you work for them for a long time.

And, regardless of skills, connections, etc., I still am concerned of any change in my job status. Career narratives or hoping to join the managerial classes don't pay bills or save for retirement. I wish I gave more stock to this idea when younger.

Especially if management is slightly worse than at my current job. It would be easy but wrong to write them of as incompetent based on articles like this. This would be quite costly for anyone making that mistake.

* Executive ethics focus on maximizing shareholder value, while individual incentives, on personal returns. If I can pollute a lake for an extra buck to my stock price, I'm expected to do this.

* HR ethics focus on protecting the company. If they can lie to you as an employee to minimize legal risk, that's what's gonna happen.

* Legal ethics focusing on protecting your client (no matter how evil), while practice focuses on maximizing billable hours.

... and so on. It's not good or bad. It just is. As a programmer, you'll be off-putting to people from those groups for reasons just as valid or invalid.

And generalizations are often accurate. If you don't show a certain modesty and humility in gift-receiving in China, you'll be an outcast. If you don't show a certain opulence and over-the-top gratitude in some parts of the Middle East and show the same, you'll be an outcast just as much.

Guess what happens when the two cultures come together?

People are viewed as jerks.

A little cross-cultural training goes a long ways to avoid that. I'm sorry you don't like the tone, but I viewed this as a fair guide for programmers managing corporate settings running into those barriers. This article appears to do a fine job explaining HR's role to people coming from e.g. CS undergrad degrees which will prevent them from getting hurt. It's no better or worse than a guide for e.g. American women as to what to expect if they marry someone from Saudi culture.

As a footnote, quotation marks suggest you're quoting someone. Your claimed quote doesn't exist in the source article. Your point would be stronger if you commented on what the author wrote than your (somewhat inaccurate) read-between-the-lines. That's another place cultures differ a lot: how things are implied and subtexts. People misread subtexts, which I think you did here.

I personally think it's different. I'm not showing off type(and even the opposite) but I see how visibility of what you(or your team did)it is very important, because I don't notice other people's work outside of my team, either!:p

This sounds cynical, but it's not nefarious at all:

1) As a manager (at various points in my career), I have better things to focus my time on than sick policies, vacations, sick leave, or similar. I'd rather focus on mentorship, growth, strategy, and technology. Outsourcing the menial stuff to someone else means I can manage people better. Plus, they're more likely to do it right. If I have a 16 year old intern who is a resident of Ohio working remotely whose parents are on an H1B visa who wants to do an unpaid work-sponsored training program beyond their 40 hour work week...

2) As a manager, I have no background in how to resolve legal issues. If an employee engaged in improper behavior (harassment, theft, etc.), the last thing you want are amateurs handling this. It's a relief to offload that onto professionals, both for the manager (who doesn't want the stress or liability) and the company (who doesn't want the liability).

... and so on.

HR is the company's agent. It's not your friend. It's job isn't fairness, anonymity, or justice, but to protect the company. It's still a necessary function and having it there is not evil, so long as employees don't go in with the expectation HR is some impartial judge. It's not. A lot of kids come in and treat it that way, and get into a lot of trouble.

We've actually used CMS to improve recruitment and retention of engineers in an organization. I subscribe to hard realism. We can't pay like FAANG, and we can't promise a fast career track. What do we offer? Oh, lots of things that don't cost money but are highly valued by engineers. Honesty. Transparent culture - who gets paid more, promoted, and why. Engineering excellence - management does not decide on tech choices, all decisions are negotiated from the principle of compromise between excellence, financial viability and short-and long-term benefits. Not dictatorial "transformational" leadership, with "agile" on top.

Guaranteed no overtime for engineers. Flexible schedules. The opportunity to participate, in an active, self-determined, ethics-steered way, in creating tech solutions that impact millions of humans positively, with no moral gray areas.

This particular org is honest about not giving "fuck-you money", but it also guarantees not bidding on military contracts, manipulating people to the lowest denominator, or engaging in surveillance capitalism.

From the earliest recruitment communication, we make it clear that we don't do corporate cringe. No inspirational coaches. No transformational coaches. No coaches, period. We don't do "teambuilding" exercises. We do send people to conferences, on the company dime, and have the option of on-the-payroll personal project, for those that want it.

  Surprising how easy it is to compete for talent with idiot companies that expect "loyalty" that they translate as "blind obedience through fear".

I can totally agree that they are not competent and not dedicated, as far as my personal experience goes. But the corruption I have not seen.

Workplaces are funny environments, they aren't natural places to be.

Ive never seen or heard of an HR department that didn't put the dictates of management first.

Your team is not automatically your friend. They are your coworkers (as is your boss and anyone else in the company). It's possible for friendships to grow there, but it's not common.

And another thing, you are not free to terminate the arrangement because you need money to live, the company is indeed free to terminate it.

That was true for many in the feudal times too, they could shop around and pledge their allegiance to one or another feudal lord, and even be given a plot of land to cultivate (as long as the lord got their share of the results).

If anything, the feudal lords left them even more to their own devices, and demanded even less of their produce (like 10% was common).

If it wasn't for the lack of technology and modern conveniences and frequent wars and dangers from outside, it would be a pretty good lifestyle...

If you really think that’s true, do it on camera. Upload it to YouTube. Let it go viral. See something happens.

They could cough on you while unmasked.

That is - the fact that Linux and Python have BDFLs is not the reason for their success. The fact that they have effective BDFLs who make sound decisions that actually work is the reason for their success. And the BDFLs only have power insofar as the community still believes in them - Guido stepped down and Linus has faced significant opposition.

BDFLs and traditional corporate governance are quite efficient, yes. But democracy doesn't aim to be efficient; it promises to be pointed in the right direction. There's no sense in going at 100x speed in the wrong direction. Democracy isn't the only way to get there - if you have tangible data about leadership and where they're pointed and how they make decisions, and the cost of switching is fairly low (so that you can keep pressure on leadership), that works too.

When was the last time you had any data about how effective your management chain would be when you started your job?

(I'm happy in my current job because I asked hard questions about management at each place I interviewed, and I found one where my own management chain seemed to have good people - but even so, only one person in my management chain is still the same as when I interviewed, so I still took a gamble, and I had far less data on any of them from a bit over a day of interviews than anyone has on Linus or Guido.)

Also, it seems like your definition of freedom has no responsibility attached to the actions. Yes, you may be able to do as you wish, but so can others onto you(especially if they have more leverage).

Isn't the common argument of economists that democracies are more efficient? (I do believe they're just paying service to their own governments, and just say what gets them grants and such, but in any case, that's the conventional wisdom).

Plus, democracies are "less efficient" compared to what dictatorship that did better than a democracy?

The main counter-example that comes to mind is China, and even them are mainly effective because of huge population and low labor costs, by being the place to outsource production by those democracies that can pay for it.

>I can't imagine them being nearly as effective because democratic processes to get new features would always be gridlocked.

Grid-locked by what? The purpose of voting in a democracy is to remove gridlocks. You don't even have to vote for everything, you can vote on a platform, and can delegate power for a certain time to someone to make the decisions, and then judge how they performed, and vote again after the period ended.

>Outside of work I certainly live in a free society. I can walk up to a rich person ("a lord") and insult him to his face and nothing will happen.*

You'd be surprised.

Plus, they can crush your neighborhood (e.g. to throw the tenants out and build some monstrocity), cajole with your lawmakers, fuck your working life, pollute your city/countryside/water supply, and usually nothing will happen.

And if they really cared, they could trivially have you killed, with nothing happening. It's just not worth the small risk of them being tied to it. But they hire legal teams and detectives to throw dirt at their enemies all the time..

Only if you define freedom as the capacity to do whatever is allowed or at least not expressly prohibited by the state without legal consequence. Fortunately no one defines it that way. You cannot be simultaneously free and subject to state power. Companies simply add another layer atop the restrictions to freedom imposed by the state. You might feel freer outside of work, but don't make the mistake of thinking you are free.

Being satisfied with temporary respite from greater restrictions imposed at work is hardly something you should celebrate. Slaves in antebellum America enjoyed free time as well, presumably many were intelligent and self-aware enough to resent their situation despite this.

The major downsides of old-school feudalism were (1) Doesn't really scale to populations of 200k+ and (2) the We Cannot Get Out problem.

Corporate structure solves both those problems pretty neatly.

For many people that isn't really true. And even if you are in a high-demand profession, and have the necessary negotiations skills, moving between jobs has a pretty high transaction cost.

I don't think anybody is seriously suggesting that employees be able to do whatever they want without limit and still be entitled to a pay cheque from a corporation.

Just as nobody would suggest that some despicable organisation be granted a legal charter to perform some anti-social, destructive, or massively wasteful activities... (sarcasm alert!) :)

But I think that, despite taking different routes, we arrive at the same conclusion that, yes, there are also positive legislative actions that could be taken (healthcare, UBI, others) which would effectively incentivize decent corporate behaviour without needing to set specific new rules or limits.

Perhaps the analogy works better for graduate students. Advisors often control a Ph.D. student's academic progress and financial support, and it's very hard to change advisors without starting over from scratch.

An employee thinks they can, in many countries they can't, as there isn't any other job to do.

I'm vastly ignorant on the subject, but that makes me wonder if there were any serfs moving to other regions or countries back then, and if so, how that worked out for them.

Well, the reason they're "paying the bill" is because they have the money and you don't.

Which is as good as the King having gold and army, and you, the serf not.

>Arguably, this is as it should be. Taken to its logical conclusion the alternative would mean that nobody is entitled to make a decision about anything without taking a referendum on the matter.

If only we weren't forced by the laws of nature to take things to their "logical conclusion" (i.e. their exaggerated slippery slope ending), but could instead use some moderation and judgment, but still come with something better than strict hierachical dominance in companies...

If only...

Paying the bill with money made by who? Sure, in the case of independent contractors the money is coming out of someone's pocket, but in most structured companies (which is what GP is talking about), the money comes from the people making and pushing the product. In real terms, the employees are the ones paying the bill.

>Taken to its logical conclusion the alternative would mean that nobody is entitled to make a decision about anything without taking a referendum on the matter.

That's literally just an argument against democracy, which we have, as a society, come to the conclusion is a generally good thing. (Well, fascists disagree, but society also has opinions on them.)

>Reasonable people will be interested in informed input from the people they employ, but it should not be surprising that in the end the painter you hired doesn’t get a vote on the color you want your bathroom.

You're conflating the relationship as a client and the relationship as an employer. You get to tell them what color paint to use, but not what type of ladder or brushes to use, or whether they're allowed to use the bathroom, sit while working, or eat lunch.

I think a much more generous reading would be that taken to it's natural conclusion this would mean that leaders in the workplace would govern more by consent and not by fiat based on their ability to wield economic power within the corporate structure as lever to coerce workers in to faithfully executing their commands no matter how ridiculous or counter-productive.

Corporations are constituted entirely by laws which evolve under democratic processes and those laws have already been used to limit, structure, and shape the power that corporate managers hold. They cannot defraud investors, they cannot imprison or lash their employees and so on. So is it really unimaginable that there might be some kind of democratic legal reform that would place other limits on their powers without requiring death by a million referenda? I don't think so.

In fact, I think there's probably every reason to believe that, if anything, shareholders would be even better served by preventing executives and middle management from building fiefdoms loyal to them personally which are often not really in-line with the goals of the institution.

That said, I can see an eventual path for this. The "problem companies" definitely won't be interested, at least at first, and the only companies that would choose this are the ones least likely to need it. Given time and publicity, these companies may have an easier time hiring, until eventually there is sufficient pressure on the "problem companies" that they feel they have to change to this to continue to hire.

That might have an okay shot in industries like tech, where you could argue that employees still have a lot of choice in employer. I don't see it working in other industries (that could probably use it a lot more), like the legal industry or food production.

My boss and my boss’s boss booked a meeting with me at 17:00 in an external meeting room. My boss’s boss did the actual firing. My direct boss just sat there like a sad puppy.

They handed me a piece of paper and I signed it. I was still in shock. I was escorted to my desk to collect my things and then taken to the head of HR for my “exit interview”.

I told her the whole story and she actually seemed shocked herself. I think I spent over an hour with her, holding back tears, explaining “I wasn’t even told what I did wrong. What am I supposed to do now?”

She told me that she thought what the company was wrong. It didn’t change anything but it meant something at least, considering the state I was in.

I noticed from her LinkedIn that she left the company a couple of months later as well.

Although, it does remind me of reading about the rush to judgment that killed Nortel. While not totally related, the inciting incident is something along the lines of something appeared a little weird in a financial statement. To avoid even a perception of impropriety, nortel hired a top outside firm to investigate whether there was anything wrong.

The resulting investigation according to the author led to a chain of events and witch hunt that led to the downfall of Nortel and needless criminal prosecution of executives.

Anyways, probably not so much a comment on the idea itself, but more just a thought on possible outcomes when the process goes wrong, whether internal or external.

It needs to be jointly owned by both the employer and the employee for there to be any chance of an equitable balance between conflicting interests of the company who's paying the bill and the company who's providing HR services, with that of the employee, as outlined in some of the other responses you've received.

Based on the inherent complexity of the above, I think the simplest model would be where an employee is also the employer, ie. ownership of the company by the employee.

This allows for the greater good, the future of the whole company, against the rights of the employee to be balanced within the company.

There are plenty of examples of companies owned by their employees.

If you want something 3rd party that can be impartial ("sometimes", in quotes) and sit on a table with both company and employee, that's unions.

This exists, it’s called “binding arbitration” and it is heavily biased towards the company because they pay its bills.

This year, for example, the council members where I work have been very busy ensuring that company plans for layoffs were as fair to employees as it was possible to be, by doing things like ensuring that if someone could be moved to another role they were, that the voluntary layoff system was suitable, and so forth.

There are also unions which are cross-company and were involved to a lesser degree in this process, providing advice and specialist support, consulting with members, and so on.

Unsurprisingly, dictatorial and democratic companies don't want to cooperate with each other.

And in many societies, the latter are a small minority so they struggle to survive.

Largely the reason so few businesses are cooperatives is because if you are an active participant in the founding of a business its in your own self interest to retain as much power over it as possible, which leads you to want to establish a dictatorship rather than a democracy - even if you aren't the founder / owner / CEO, being a first generation "lord" of the company will net you much greater bounty if it succeeds than if your compensation was dictated by a majority of your peerage.

That and absolutely nobody knows what cooperatives even are. Establishing a complex managerial democracy is way excessive for mom and pop shops or businesses with less than a half dozen employees and then those dictatorships scale up into larger and larger enterprises with no incentive to transition away from top down power structures. The benefits are largely for those who, under the current regime, have no power or say anyway, and thus the utility of more stable, productive, or resilient businesses is lost when it would cost the founders and owners their potential for ludicrous wealth and unquestionable power.

[1] https://siepr.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/publications/...

1. Not everyone here is a coder.

2. Not everyone who codes is in the US, or a small number of other countries, where salaries for coders are high.

3. Not everyone lives in a part of the US with multiple employers that they could work for (relocation may be infeasible for various reasons).

4. The company may be sponsoring the worker's visa.

I think GP was talking about workers in general, not just software developers. Software developers are in a super entitled position when it comes to this. Not every grocery store cashier, McDonald's worker, taxi driver, etc. can be expected to "do things other people can't".

In principle I agree though

Yeah that’s not a powerful move, that’s the equivalent of leaving the country. What happens if they’re all run along the exact same lines? You can start your own I guess, which is not feasible for most people.

That’s why we require the democratically elected leviathan to limit the power these people have over others.

I agree with your point but ultimately, why not have the engineer document how long the last cycle took to get into production. So when the manager asks, hey do this in 70% of the time, you have reference to live recent data that it’s impossible.

Or even simpler. Manager asks to finish something and have it live in Y days.

You will finish it in Y days because the last project needed an additonal 3 days and you communicated that immediately back then, so your manager already has provided a solution by the time you’re ready for the next development cycle or sprint. Hence Y days should be computed with feedback you already communicated from the last cycle.

>> You have to educate your managers a bit.

Ironically, this could come off as feudal since a manager is “senior” in terms of time and experience at the same company. In which you are currently a junior. How often will a manager be like “so glad you educated me on my own delivery and timelines, you were right!” Versus hey, that’s my job, you worry about yours and I got mine.

I think the word “synchronize” (delivery times for production, ie) applies better than educate.

Why worry about educating them if you’ve set a self-expectation to communicate immediately when something is not as expected. Or as initially agreed between the employee and their team or manager (s).

Majority of these empathy gaps b/w managers and engineers is actually the byproduct of failed communication protocols that both parties can maximize upon assuming consistent internet service (unfortunately still not the case or available with examples of significant gains. The moment you start caring about how another feels or thinks towards your execution, work, or biz strategy, gg.

You are now thinking about what others are thinking, and planning all these scenarios to ensure you act accordingly + optimally. This whole hr analogy shouldn’t even exist - it reminds me or read receipts on iMessage. Back in the old day, you didn’t have the information of when someone actually opened your mail indoors.

All I’m saying is to forget about the hierarchy + roles and just crisp clean communication up front.

Any gaps in understanding means that you needed to communicate much clearer, earlier. Versus, omg hr might be out to get me or something.

Do you know people who aren't coders?

You know we live and work in some sort of dream land and 99% of people in other jobs don't have anywhere near this level of freedom and bargaining power.

You will sell yourself short by forgetting this. Coding isn't guaranteed to stay like this - as tooling gets better and better and more people get into it we will be seen less and less like wizards.

Democratic nation with a strong Oligarchy. Who over years forged q corpocracy that obfuscate such via citizens united. The basis in which we operate is democratic, but popular public policies are rarely enacted.

As to why you put too much emphasis on violence. Think of labor the united states has thanks to corporal punishment. Why waste labor?

In the end it doesn't matter too much as even the beginnings of a GAI would derail such a system. Think on the idiocy at the capital the other day and the post truth aspect that spurred it on.

At least in some countries, if you have a life-threatening medical condition and you lose your job, you're at a significant risk of death.

Just because you have it easy, doesn't mean everyone does. Billions of people are terrified of losing their jobs, because that means starvation or a slow painful death from a disease they can no longer afford to treat.

I worked with an Indian woman that was worked so hard that she had a spontaneous abortion. On a Sunday. And was made to go back to work that same day.

I wouldn't say it's crazy. Your employer can just schedule you to work on election day, forcing you to choose between participating in democracy and not starving. Heck, I would go so far as to say that Covid elected Joseph Biden. If mail voting wasn't made so widespread, it's entirely possible that not enough people would have gone to the polls and we would be stuck with the fucking angry orange for another 4 years.

This post is _especially_ for folks like you. When something shitty happens at work, you might contemplate contacting HR for the first time in your life. This post is a warning: HR defends the company's interest, not yours. They are not a neutral court of appeals.

Starting not to be surprised she has such a bone to pick with HR