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Comment by bko | Hacker News Reader

HR ruined everything didn't they?

I heard a comedian make the point that HR only began to exist once women became more prevalent in the workforce. And at that point you do need much more oversight. And having women in the workforce is positive since they're ~50% of the population and offer distinct experiences.

But I wonder the unseen downsides of having HR so powerful in an organization. From useless screening of candidates, to overly corrective actions by everyone terrified HR will essentially fire them. Maybe it would be better to have 1-2 glasses of wine during lunch occasionally. They're extra-judicial, easily the most powerful group in an organization with little oversight.

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My guess is that you're in the US. Here in the Netherlands, while there's plenty to criticize or laugh about, HR is also responsible for pensions, benefits, workplace safety, reintegration from sickness, ensuring that staff is well trained for their role, etc.

At my org they also organize the Thursday evening drinks session :)

> pensions, benefits, workplace safety, reintegration from sickness,

We use Justworks and they do that all for us. You're technically an employee of Justworks, and their name shows up on your paychecks. You hook into their health and 401k benefits, and they check all the workplace safety boxes. For instance, they'll mail you posters you legally have to put up in your office to ensure you're telling employees about overtime. HR plays literally no role in any of time apart from maybe selecting the health plans, something we do once a year and roll over every time.

> ensuring that staff is well trained for their role

What does an HR person know about training for your role? Is HR cross-trained in engineering for instance? Seems wildly different from my experience. HR would ineffectively screen candidates and ask you about buzz words. So they'll ask "do you have experience in Javascript" and I'll say "no, but I have a lot of experience in Typescript" and they'll just screen me out because they'll have no context.

And HR staff is also much more social so they'll pick up on awkwardness and screen there as well, when in many fields like engineering, the tolerance of awkwardness is much higher.

Surely this just means Justworks is your HR team?

> What does an HR person know about training for your role?

IME they don't know anything about the training itself. But they don't work in a vacuum, so there will be training programs set up by "regular" staff, and HR will make sure that you have access to them, that you attend your training if it's mandatory, etc. They'll also ask you if you need any kind of training you're not getting, and figure out a way for you to get it. Again, this usually involves the "technical" staff. They're typically facilitators.

This is what I've noticed in two medium-sized companies in France.

Uhh… that sounds a bit weird. Your contract is with a random third party? So your company could just fuck you at any moment?

Being from the US, I hadn't considered that HR could be anything other than employee hostile.

> Here in the Netherlands, while there's plenty to criticize or laugh about, HR is also responsible for pensions, benefits, workplace safety, reintegration from sickness, ensuring that staff is well trained for their role, etc.

Mostly true for big companies in the US as well.

HR is a powerful organization for a reason. Companies everywhere operate in a legal environment, and 90% of what HR does is keep the company from getting sued.

> 90% of what HR does is keep the company from getting sued

Which people would be wise to remember. HR is there to protect the company, not you or your co-workers. Sometimes these two things align but not always.

I believe this is the legal team. There are a lot of self imposed restrictions HR puts on companies, like the can't have a drink during lunch, but I don't understand how ignoring such rules leads to getting sued.

For sex stuff, sure, which was my point about women. A former employee can sue for being fired or harassed, etc. And I guess having everyone jump through hoops with training about all the various isms can provide plausible deniability when something illegal happens. But I think you're overstating the role HR plays here.

> A former employee can sue for being fired or harassed

Yes. This is where all the rules come from. It's just like airline safety or workplace safety: for almost every rule, you can find the incident which caused it to be put in place.

The problem here is you not believing sexual harassment is real, or a real problem. There have been enough women bullied out of jobs they loved by harassment from male co-workers, over and over again, and enough of them have won their lawsuits or tribunals against the employers, that there are rules against this, which will be enforced.

And enough people will have used "I was drinking" as an excuse for harassment that companies feel the need to limit their risk by banning drinking.

People get annoyed at HR for being a "compliance" role, but it's the same phenomenon as hating the people checking the fire exits, the ladders, PAT testing all your electrical devices (this may be UK specific?), making you wear a hard hat and safety boots, or making you reconcile the cash in the register with the receipts.

> The problem here is you not believing sexual harassment is real, or a real problem

???

Where do you get that from? I do think it's a problem and it becomes a problem because we accept mixed-sex work environments. HR isn't there to protect women from getting harassed, they're mostly there to protect management. Sexual harassment is still illegal, whether HR exists or not.

I don't think HR ladies are roaming factory floors making sure people are wearing hardhats. That's a managers responsibility and the company has legal obligations.

So when exactly has that non-mixed-sex workplace existed? It hasn't, the mixed nature was just buried under ungodly amounts of hierarchy full of gender defaults. With harassment just taken as a given. Partially held in check by, well, good guys who I guess have always existed, and the ones from the dark ages must have been very good given the lack of external checks, but those 20 or whatever percent who weren't must have made life quite miserable for those at the wrong side of the default imbalance. Yes, progress has happened but we should still have more of it, not less. And HR plays a role in this progress, even if at times it appears a little annoying or excessive.

The non-mixed-sex workplace was definitely a thing in the early 20th century that required explicit effort to change.

There was literally a legislative marriage bar in the Irish Civil Service from 1924 till 1973.

The marriage bar forced female civil servants in Ireland to resign from their jobs when they got married and stopped married women from joining the permanent civil service.

We were far from the only country to have such mandates, and it was done so as an equivalence with the governance processes of the private sector. Divorce was only legalised in Ireland 1995.

How many lady sailors, how many lady soldiers, how many lady construction workers, how many lady ditch diggers, how many lady truckers?

In the past (and still today in many places), most of the workforce were not working in mixed gender places. Just take a look at photographic evidence of the many factories that only employed women.

Drinking at lunch is a great example. The company can get sued for that.

Not specifically for that, but if something does go wrong afterwards it makes the company much more likely to be liable for not preventing it.

Yes, that's what I meant. Employers are the deep pocket defendants that might get roped into a lawsuit resulting from bad behavior on the part of their employees.

The only problems with that reasoning is that women have been in the workplace for hundreds of years (domestic service, textiles, etc), and human resources started appearing in about 1900, approximately 50 years before mixed workplaces were common.

Mixed workplaces are more problematic. Most industries were almost exclusively single sex and things worked well without HR

"Things worked well without HR". Do you assume that all problems in the workplace are/were sex-related and between heterosexual men and women?

If you were right, literary works like Nikolai Gogol's "The overcoat" wouldn't exist. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Overcoat

Most industries were almost exclusively single sex and things worked well without HR

HR was invented because workplaces didn't work well, and that was about 50 years before mixed workplaces were common. You're just projecting your biases and ignoring the facts.

I don't think we can blame this one on HR, people just aren't drinking as much alcohol, all over the developed world.

The US isn't even an outlier. I'm not sure why, I don't buy the health reason argument, since I don't think people pay attention to health studies. And they have been smoking (marijuana) which is terrible for the lungs and has other health issues. And there are problems with obesity.

It's not because of health consciousness.

Overall, people aren't drinking or having sex or going out as much, these are all in decline.

People are more neurotic now because of ubiquitous gamification and scoring. Health and aging and looks are scored, alcohol will cost you. Appearing controlled and on brand is a game, alcohol throws the game off. We’ve chosen a dry panopticon.

No you can't just give people free rein to sexually harass the female staff.

I'd be very surprised if a full review didn't reveal that early HR more often existed to protect high position males against females in the workplace.

Behaviors and cultural norms don't change overnight, and HR is ultimately subordinate to leadership, especially in private companies with partnership structures, etc.

Modern HR feels like a better balance, with the caveat that it will usually protect the company from any employee.

Loads of women in the workforce in WWII. Was there anything like HR? (Not counting the recruiting departments, which were focused on finding & retaining workers in a very tight labor market.)

Instead of "women in the workforce", I'd say it was changing society and social norms. A century-ish ago, in quite a few sorts of places, workspace disputes might well be settled with fists. (Yes, there were many norms and unwritten rules about that.) Post-WWII, there was a long trend of gentrifying social mores, which discouraged such things. New laws and legal norms encouraged lawsuits over things previously tolerated, or settled informally. And more than just women, civil rights laws and norms pushed into the workplace. Bring in the lawyers, reporters, new public ideals - and a business really needed an HR Dept., to prevent disasters.

(Yes, this pretty is US-specific.)

Is that really HR or a reflection of the social environment in your specific country. I never found HR to be a problem in Norway.

And for what benefit? 9/10 ”problems“ HR ”solves“ were created by them in the first place. HR is a net negative to society.

That is over the top. HR on the whole protects the employees and the organization. The experience you reference is not my experience at all and sounds disingenuous. We don't get to do whatever we want in the workplace, there are social structures that need to be adhered to. Like with any power structure there are people who will maximize their control for its own sake which is unfortunate but not an excuse to dismiss the whole concept.

Surely a comedian isn't the right person for this analysis.

The first HR departments were created to defuse feminist agitation for equality in the workplace. They were place in opposition to women's equality, not in alignment to it.

Why do you believe that HR has little oversight? HR reports to the bosses same as everybody else. They aren't some rogue insurgent organization within corporations.

That comedian needs some new material yikes

You can frequently drink with HR at biotechs.

if we can be in offices now without regressive troglodytes in positions of authority freely making loud racist (and completely personalized) insults directed at their non-white peers and subordinates, to the guffaws of all the other men in the room (this is an actual thing I witnessed as a young intern at a defense contractor in the late 1980s, and no I was not the victim. to get a racist incident so glaring that even in 1988, it stays in the mind of a young white 18 year old kid for 40 years, means it had to be pretty bad), HR probably didn't ruin exactly everything.

Alcohol is a terrible drug. IMO it is a great thing that drinking at work is so frowned upon that it is basically verboten.

Yea I don’t get all the moping in this thread about alcohol being in decline.

In my country it was wayyy to socially acceptable (almost required) to get blackout drunk every weekend; people fighting; drunk drivers; the amount of alcoholics destroying their life because it’s so accessible.

Don’t get me wrong i enjoy a drink once in a while, even getting drunk sometimes but overall it’s a terrible terrible drug.

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