Comment by mrandish | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mrandish | Hacker News Reader

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As an entrepreneur who founded a tech startup that grew up to a few hundred people, HR was handled by half an administrative/finance person. It was mostly just payroll, health insurance, onboarding, some compliance paperwork and a little recruiting.

When we were acquired by a F500 public company with >10k employees, they had more HR staff than my entire company. I do wish the TFA had more details on the issues this CEO experienced but I don't think he's exaggerating. My biggest issue was that BigCo's HR dept was the source of a lot of disruption and distraction for my people. Several of my top engineers complained about all the mandatory training sessions, compliance paperwork and online "learning modules" with nanny robo-quizzes. It was a lot.

The thing is, before being acquired we were in full compliance with all state and federal regs, yet somehow there was ~5x more HR burden at BigCo. And managers got all that plus an extra side of mandatory "managing people" training sessions and robo-quizzes. Then managers had to enter detailed quarterly evals and everyone had to participate in a pointless "360" peer review process that couldn't help feeling vaguely dystopian. And BigCo was proud to be the sector leader in employee satisfaction and retention. Everything was first-class, top-quadrant and 'industry best practice" yet my startup had substantially better satisfaction & retention numbers with an "HR Team" of 0.5 people and a tiny fraction the cost, time and cognitive burden on everyone.

> Several of my top engineers complained about all the mandatory training sessions, compliance pakperwork and online "learning modules" with nanny robo-quizzes. It was a lot.

Been through this and it was all for compliance. Legal checkboxes. So the corp can say 'we did what was required'. For the quizzes I had to take (refreshed yearly) I was given the answer key. Whoever took the test first in a given year would jot down the keys. Since it was all for 'compliance' no one gave a hoot. All theater and HR only cared that you took it (their checkbox). In the tech world vendor compliance comes closest to this. I no longer ascribe blame - it is the bigger legal system and framework that drives this. Change has to come from without.

I used to work at a large global company that was part of a uopoly in its industry. We had a lot of mandatory training about bribery, how its forbidden to offer bribes and receive bribes. A lot of training and processes around data retention, for privacy and also for lawsuit discovery... I guess the training was mandated because of previous egregious violations. A F500, older company likely comes with a long history of mandatory remediations for past transgressions.

> mandatory remediations for past transgressions.

Weirdly, this can actually cause companies that didn't do the bad thing (bribes, etc) to voluntarily, proactively adopt widespread, comprehensive, mandatory, highly-audited training to tell every single employee NOT to do that bad thing. That way, if some rogue employee(s) do that thing, having the audited paper trail proving how very hard the company tried to NOT do that thing, can be invaluable in defending the company. In the event of prosecution it can lower the penalties but even better, it helps in diverting potential prosecution into a settlement / consent decree - as well as negotiating lower penalties and settlement amounts.

This was actually the source of one onerous training requirement at BigCo, which I learned about over drinks with our Chief Legal Officer. Apparently, one company (not us) having an extreme punitive penalty slapped on them generates scary WSJ headlines every compliance training vendor uses on Slide #1 in their sales pitches.

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