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Comment by harry8 | Hacker News Reader

Also, sadly:

"HR is your enemy. The role of HR is to protect the CEO and his team when they do something unspeakable and to smooth the way when firing people."

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HR is not your friend, but to say they are your enemy is overly reductive.

The job of HR is to protect the company, which often means ensuring things are done by the book, or that enough compensation is given that it is better to take the money than argue.

They aren't your friend, but they aren't your bosses friend either, and if your boss is trying to do something that will get the company in trouble then you may find that you and HR are on the same side. I've seen this happen when a friend's manager was trying to put somebody on a PIP without a good reason and it did not end well for the manager.

That's true, though I think statistically, the higher up the food chain you are, the more likely HR is going to be your friend. Leadership tends to band together and influence HR policy to favor managers over do-ers.

I feel like a lot of people I’ve known who work in HR are very much into the high school popular kids clique mentality. Not all. I’ve known very wonderful souls who work in HR but it attracts “people person” types who seem to thrive on gossip and secret communications not unlike a bunch of high school girls.

> They aren't your friend, but they aren't your bosses friend either

To be clear, sometimes they are close friends with your boss. Sometimes they are also the corporate lawyer.

I've encountered this situation in the past.

HR in large firms is the “people risk department”. People introduce all sorts of risk to a company. They sometimes don’t perform, they have bad behaviours that cause secondary effects/blowback on the company (you didn’t protect me from employee X with bad behaviour Y causing me problem Z).

To be clear, the official role of HR is to protect the company, which objectives are defined by the owners, represented by the board, not the CEO. Goals of the CEO and the board may align, but they may not, in that latter case a non-corrupt HR function sides with the board. At the end of the day, the CEO is just another employee.

>which objectives are defined by the owners, represented by the board, not the CEO

You'd be surprised how non-involved the board could be.

>At the end of the day, the CEO is just another employee.

In many cases they can also have a controlling share of the company, and most of their board and C-level be their pals and picks, so there's that.

When our company hired HR, a lot improved. They were not my friends, but they did a much better administrative job then the chaos previously.

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