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Comment by BubbleRings | Hacker News Reader

Managers, one solution here is pretty easy. For instance, if your team has a daily status meeting, just tell them "every other Friday, cameras are encouraged". That's it. Don't make it mandatory, don't make jokes about "Joe never turns his camera on, what does his place look like?" In a world that is getting more and more lonely for a lot of people, this can be a life saver.

And to HR, I have a similar message. Do your job. Just because someone is a contractor, doesn't mean you can't put in a little effort when bad things happen. One of my co-workers died of covid early in the pandemic. The place I was contracting at basically disappeared him, it was disgusting. Part of the reason I was laid off may have been because I started contacting managers up the chain saying basically "do _something_ to acknowledge that a member of the team has died for Pete's sake!"

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The moment you realize HR is there to serve the company's interests, not the employee's, your expectation of them changes.

Are there any orgs that don’t serve the company?

I say this both being a non-unionized often-contractor, but in some other industries that would be the union. Ignoring all the politics sounds that, growing up I certainly got to witness my dad’s coworkers and union come together to help out their members personally when tragedy struck, as well as planning social events and fundraisers. Some parts of union can be really bad, but they’re not exclusively bad.

In a HR org that is damaging to the company, they always side with the company; What is unique to HR, is that can often turn them AGAINST an individual worker.

I could see the difference with "commodity" employees, and that sucks, but what's the big difference if we are talking about programmers? The company is obviously very interested to make us not want to leave, and also probably interested that we feel like caring about the product.

Possibly true when the programmers are building the company's product. I happen to work for a company where all of IT is a cost center.

I think if that was true then large raises would be the norm as they know programmers often leave every couple years for a 20+ % raise.

Taking good care of employees and contractors can be in the company's interest, though. It's costly to lose them and having to hire new ones, and ex employees talking badly about a company also is not good.

(I'd think, I don't work in HR, so no idea what actual directives they have).

You'd be amazed at how often those coincide if there's not a culture of omerta.

It's almost as if happy employees are in a company's interest. Not paramount, but not neglected either.

Culture of omerta - I had to look it up.

There'll always be culture of omerta when you don't give someone a piece of the company.

If I'm an hourly employee, our interests are not aligned. You don't value me enough to share the wins but I know I'll be sharing in the losses by getting fired.

To everyone pretending otherwise - wake the fuck up.

I would like to gently caution and remind everyone that seeing coworker faces once a week may not have been the make-or-break in why Pete took his own life. And for all we know it may have made him feel worse.

A relatively solitary and cognitively intense discipline like software engineering could be one place in society (one!) where genuine introverts are understood and appreciated.

(I certainly agree that we should acknowledge when a team member dies and give people space to be sad!)

HR has 1 job. Protect the company, they aren't your friends at all. If announcing a teammates passing helps the company they would do it, if they don't think it would they wouldn't.

No emotions come into this.

(this is not to say you can't have friends at work, but the company is not your family and will drop you the day you aren't productive any longer)

> HR has 1 job. Protect the company

I see this from time to time and it irritates me. I'm not in HR. I know some people who are and people who go into that line of work often do care about making people's lives better.

Certainly if that conflicts somehow with a a requirement to protect the company, they may have to prioritise the latter. But that doesn't mean that they have 'one job'.

I think it does. At the end of the day they will (and should) choose to protect the company above all else. That's their only job.

They can also want to help people, have a ton of empathy and be literal saints. But that's their personal motivation and not what the job actually is.

I'd be interested to see the logic applied to other jobs. What's your job using this kind of reductionist logic? Are there any jobs that aren't "protect the company" in some way?

If you're working for a for-profit company .... uhh no?

And I'm a software engineer, I solve business problems with code. If I decide to to write some code that doesn't help the company I would probably be fired or at least put on a PIP

If there's one thing I've learned from mgmt it's that happy teams make for performant teams. The employees trust that I'll support them in creating a fulfilling work environment and look out for them. If I'd take all decisions with the companies profits in mind I'd break that trust which wouldn't lead anywhere good. When an issue arises I'll sometimes be on the side with sr mgmt, sometimes with the team, sometimes it will be more complex than choosing sides. Not all decisions can (or should) be boiled down to dollars and cents.

Perhaps you should ask someone in your HR department to tell you more about their mission as I doubt they'd share these views.

That's right your job is to protect the business by producing code that maximises profit and doesn't put them at risk.

That's all you do

> people who go into that line of work often do care about making people's lives better.

That's a fine motive, but it's similar to joining Facebook in order to help people improve their attention span

I see this often and it is a ridiculous over simplification.

This entire thread has stories of broken corporate culture causing people to leave the company and somehow you’re translating that as win for HR?

In most cases, HR aren’t the ones “dropping” you (it’s your manager). They’re the ones ensuring it gets done in a way that least disruptive to the rest of the org.

What is your easy solution for exactly? A manager suggesting a team to turn on their cameras means "turn on your camera.". It will cause stress.

It sounds like they developed a good working relationship and that camera/no camera didn't make a difference at all.

I was thinking mostly about my experience working fully remotely for the last two years at more than one contracting job. And saying that if I was a manager, I would definitely tell people on Fridays or every other Friday "we turn on cameras if you are comfortable with it."

Such mandatory face-time—and mandatory social interaction in general—can make things better or worse. It can make things better because someone might need more social interaction. On the other hand it can make things worse because some people are more lonely in a crowd rather than when they are by themselves.

Had 2 panic attacks from a well being manager forcing social interaction to keep up team moral. So yeah there is no easy solution, we're all different.

I wouldn't expect HR to do anything, nor would I expect them to send out a mail if someone quit or were fired.

I do think the right thing is for the manager to acknowledge the situation and maybe hold some kind of gathering in remembrance. Possibly even pull together something to send to the family of the deceased. But I don't think this means anything coming from HR, it's gotta come from people who knew the person.

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