Improving a company 101:
* Get rid of HR people.
* Profit.
* Get rid of HR people.
* Profit.
But as you mention, if developers were to handle everything related to hiring, firing, sick reports, vacation, benefits, contracts, compliance etc. that HR does, I doubt there would be any profit.
What the HR person would know is how the person appears socially and how he manages to present himself.
The company should make sure the HR person isn't the only one deciding if somebody gets hired or not, because the HR person simply does not possess the tools needed to get the best man for the job by himself.
True story: I got an ad for a consulting position for "Postgre"
The description had as a listed skill:
"PostgreSQL USE GOOGLE TO VERIFY SPELLING"
That's a bad sign there.
Required:
Java
Open source technologies
Microsoft Visual Studio
It's easy to bash HR people just as "regular" employees often bash IT ("They won't provide that simple feature that I've been asking for ever since, just because they hate me."). But calling the role "broken" does not magically make it disappear. Someone needs to handle the employer/employee relationship and all attached nuisances - any organisation with employees that does not handle this role is more broken than any HR department I've ever seen.
I'd really hope that we'd be over this and appreciate that other people in our organisation provide value and experience that we maybe can't see at fist glance. Instead we close our eyes and call their role "broken".
The scope can be as narrow as "do background checks on hires, do the math on their desired pay and tell me how much each one would cost and if there's any red flags" or as broad as "do a first phone call and check out if you think that person is a good fit culturally." Handle all associated paperwork, set up interview dates, handle travel and accommodation arrangements for the prospective hire, ... Handle all paperwork associated with employees, sick leave, keep track of holidays, ... Follow changes in applicable law. Organise team building events. I know of an HR department that organises monthly lunches where people of the company get randomly assigned to groups so that they get to know other people working in the same company, not only their team peers. There's a lot of things you can do as HR person. Not everybody needs everything and not every HR person may have the required qualifications for each task, so you probably just have to figure out what exact set of responsibilities right for your place.
Out of curiosity, could you imagine an organization functioning where HR work was done by administrative assistants to team managers?
No. Mission creep happens on broad and narrow roles the same. The better defined the role, the better. Constant reevaluation and adaption to changed realities is a must.
> Out of curiosity, could you imagine an organization functioning where HR work was done by administrative assistants to team managers?
Up to a certain degree yes, but there's the question how and where to allocate common functions if you have any. Depends on your organisation. That doesn't make the "HR department" disappear though, it just changes its name to "administrative assistants". It certainly makes things harder when people try to reach the HR department because that's what they're used to.
All in all: If that fits your organisation, sure. Just make sure that the role is defined and someone is responsible and actually takes up the work.
edit: see also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6289282 for a point where a more centralised HR made a positive impact. An assistant to the team manager might easily have missed the broad picture because of a more narrow view, focused on the teams turnover rate.
We had an initial round of meetings and then the issue slipped with meetings getting pushed out further and further from the other side. So yes, I think that in this position the other person was in charge. In any case, even if I'd be responsible to push the agenda, a good HR department should not let an open (and known) issue slip. Quite, to the contrary, good HR should recognise situations like this before the employee ever feels the need to push for a contract renegotiation.
If you get a moment, read "Corporate Confidential" by Cynthia Shapiro. Only 200 or so pages, and it's a quick read. But very enlightening.
That's only true if the people defining the mission of various departments -- i.e., executive management -- is not competent at their job.
Reforming or eliminating HR will not fix that problem.
That depends. Are they staffed by psychologists? If yes, then no. Psychology and psychological testing are losing credibility very rapidly right now:
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/side-effects/201305/the-...
Unfortunately, they're overwhelmed by the majority, which are full of pseudoscience.
Maybe the more rigorous ones should change their titles, not to be associated with standard "psychologists" anymore?
I have been recommending that serious students, those who want to avoid the stigma of psychology, enter the field of neuroscience instead. Neuroscience will eventually replace psychiatry and psychology as the preferred approach to treating what we now call "mental illnesses", most of which are actually biological illnesses with mental symptoms. Reference:
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/elements/2013/05/the-s...
Psychiatrists are medicals doctors treating the organ "brain". It's pretty much interchangeable with neuroscience. And before once changes, one should reason very carefully, because they are completely different, and medical school is very hard, while one says that psychology tends to be easy. Also there is not much new about this approach. It's probably as old as psychology. Maybe one could say psychology developed from the former. Pawlov for example was a physiologist.
/e Well, no they are not interchangeable. A psychiatrists does not research about bionic eyes. But the way they see human psyche is pretty much.
Psychiatry and psychology are branches of human psychology -- both rely on the study of human psychology for validation. And if human psychology were a rigorous, empirical science, people wouldn't be able to say, as you just have, the psychiatry and psychology do not have much in common.
Would you say the same thing about cosmology and particle physics? They're very different -- one studies events at the smallest possible scale, the other at the largest possible scale. But no one suggests that they're unrelated to either each other or to their parent field of physics. The reason is they're sciences.
> Psychiatrists are medicals doctors treating the organ "brain".
No, that's false -- you just described the field of neuroscience (except that neuroscience is more a research than a medical field at the moment). Psychiatrists are psychologists with a medical degree, they are not neuroscientists, and they treat the mind, not the brain.
> It's pretty much interchangeable with neuroscience.
Not remotely. Neuroscience studies the brain and nervous system, psychiatry is a branch of psychology that studies the mind.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychiatry
Quote: "Psychiatry is the medical specialty devoted to the study, diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of mental disorders."
Note the phrase "mental disorders," i.e. disorders of the mind. Not "brain disorders".
\snark.
Yep. I'm hearing "cognitive neuroscientist" more often, even though those so named haven't changed their practice and are still psychologists.
In the case mentioned in the article, even a professional that truly trusts the tests should have taken into consideration:
1) make his own assesment and check against the test score,
2) realize that the test is supposedly validated against a sample, and if the candidate falls out of that sample (non-native english speaker), the test should probably be disregarded.
Carefull when disregarding a whole field based on preconceptions. All fields have different branches and disagreements. True some fields like psychology have a harder time producing great professionals, in my assesment. I think it's because of it being a young field and it's hard to agree on what the standards are to measure good/bad practice.
I think you should ask yourself some hard questions about psychology. It's true that psychology's current practices are rather unreliable, but it's not obvious how to solve that problem, given the field's subject, the human mind. If the target were the brain, that would be different, but the mind is not the brain.
For instance i find myself using MBTI ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myers-Briggs_Type_Indicator ) a lot when meeting new people and tailoring my approach in a way that is meaningful to them.
The solution is simple teach HR psychology but don't make it the be all end all solution in hiring people it should however be a tool in their tool box and they should use their best judgement. Or thrust the IT staffs judgement at least.
It's not a science at all. Sciences make observations, then craft generalizing theories to explain the observations, then test the theories in unrelated contexts, then discard those theories that fail. This is certainly not how psychology works. In psychology, it's commonplace to see a therapy for a disease whose existence hasn't yet been established, or that was brought into being by a secret vote rather than a microscope (as was true during the DSM-5 editorial process).
Am I exaggerating the requirements for real science? Let's perform a thought experiment to see. Let's say we can have science without theories, only with observations, as in modern psychology. Here goes ...
Let's say I'm a doctor and I've created a revolutionary cure for the common cold. My cure is to shake a dried gourd over the cold sufferer until he gets better. The cure might take a week, but it always works. My method is repeatable and perfectly reliable, and I've published my cure in a refereed scientific journal (there are now any number of phony refereed scientific journals). And, because (in this thought experiment) science can get along without defining theories, I'm under no obligation to try to explain my cure, or consider alternative explanations for my breakthrough — I only have to describe it, just like a psychologist.
Because I've cured the common cold, and because I've met all the requirements that psychology recognizes for science, I deserve a Nobel Prize. Yes or no?
Ask yourself what's wrong with this picture, and notice that the same thing is wrong with psychology — all description, no explanation, no established principles on which different psychologists agree, no effort to build consensus, and no unifying theories.
> You can't use psychology to make exact predictions of how people will behave however the more you learn about psychology the better you get at figuring out people and make a educated guess what motivates them.
Only if you're suffering from a bad case of confirmation bias. You need to understand that psychology is undergoing a major upheaval eight now, mostly because of improvements in neuroscience that suggest neuroscience will eventually replace psychology, in the same way that astronomy replaced astrology in the 17th century.
Psychology: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychology
Psychiatry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychiatry
Note the not to be confused with introduction on Wikipedia.
They are quite different, and while I agree that DSM-5 was a disgrace, that was somewhat inevitable given the commercial pressures involved.
Its worth noting that I agree with your major point, but it applies to psychiatry (more specifically, the DSM) rather than to psychology.
Both are studies of the mind. Psychiatrists are psychologists with an M.D. degree.
Psychology: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychology
Quote: "an academic and applied discipline that involves the scientific study of mental functions and behaviors"
Psychiatry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychiatry
Quote: "the medical specialty devoted to the study, diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of mental disorders."
See the word "mental" in both definitions? Neither studies the brain, neither is scientific, and the distinction between them is more a matter of history than topic.
I ask that you think about what you're saying. If human psychology were a science, then its two major subfields, psychiatry and psychology (there are actually 54, but never mind), would be looked on as intimately related to human psychology and to each other.
Would you argue that cosmology and particle physics aren't related to each other because they study different things, i.e. one studies the universe at the largest possible scale and the other at the smallest? Most scientists would disagree because these two fields rely on physics and physical theory for their scientific standing.
> but it applies to psychiatry (more specifically, the DSM) rather than to psychology.
False. Both psychiatry and psychology rely on the DSM as a diagnostic guide.
Link: http://www.psychiatry.org/practice/dsm
Title: "DSM"
Quote: "The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) is the standard classification of mental disorders used by mental health professionals in the United States ... It can be used by a wide range of health and mental health professionals, including psychiatrists and other physicians, psychologists, social workers, nurses, occupational and rehabilitation therapists, and counselors. "
> I agree with your major point, but it applies to psychiatry (more specifically, the DSM) rather than to psychology.
On the contrary, it applies to both, because both psychiatry and psychology depend on the DSM's imagined authority for diagnosis and treatment guidance.
If the DSM were to suddenly disappear, psychologists would have no therapeutic guidebook. That wouldn't stop them, of course, but it would be disrupting and embarrassing.
If human psychology were a science, we wouldn't be having this conversation, because psychiatry and psychology would be looked on as branches of a science with more similarities than differences, just as with cosmology and particle physics.
I hate with the blinding passion of a thousand fiery suns psychotherapy, but I find much (experimental) psychology rather interesting.
Seriously, one of the very first things they tell you in a psychology degree (at least in Europe) is that its not about therapy, and in fact that most therapists are not psychologists. The study of the human mind and what is essentially a form of confession are very, very different.
But hey, you'll believe what you want to on this one, it doesn't look like I can convince you.
Have you read any of the work of Daniel Kahneman? Thats what I would consider as psychology (even if his System One and Two stuff is a dirty hack that provides little useful insight to the field).
You don't need to clarify that, and it lacks any connection with the present topic.
> I find much (experimental) psychology rather interesting.
I would find it much more interesting if it were scientific, if its practitioners crafted and then tested falsifiable theories. But it isn't and they don't.
> But hey, you'll believe what you want to on this one, it doesn't look like I can convince you.
My position isn't based on belief, it is based on evidence. Consider this summary of an investigation into recent egregious and fraudulent psychological research:
http://news.sciencemag.org/people-events/2012/11/final-repor...
Quote: "In their exhaustive final report about the fraud affair that rocked social psychology last year, three investigative panels today collectively find fault with the field itself. They paint an image of a "sloppy" research culture in which some scientists don't understand the essentials of statistics, journal-selected article reviewers encourage researchers to leave unwelcome data out of their papers, and even the most prestigious journals print results that are obviously too good to be true."
Too bad about these academic experts and their "beliefs" about psychological research.
Incidents like the above explains why the director of the NIMH has recently decided to abandon the DSM, psychiatry and psychology's central authority, as unscientific and of no research value:
http://www.nimh.nih.gov/about/director/2013/transforming-dia...
Quote: "While DSM has been described as a “Bible” for the field, it is, at best, a dictionary, creating a set of labels and defining each. The strength of each of the editions of DSM has been “reliability” – each edition has ensured that clinicians use the same terms in the same ways. The weakness is its lack of validity."
Too bad about the NIMH director's "beliefs".
> Have you read any of the work of Daniel Kahneman? Thats what I would consider as psychology (even if his System One and Two stuff is a dirty hack that provides little useful insight to the field).
Hmm -- it seems you are now making my argument for me.
Why do I care? Why am I critical of psychology but give sociology a pass? Sociologists don't have clinics in which they tell you how sick you are, using disease definitions they voted into existence.
If this were to happen in physics we'd call it it a failed or incomplete theory.
If you cannot clearly and empirically prove a theory wrong (in principle), it is not science. Falsifiability is required for science and scientific theories. This doesn't mean all scientific theories are false, it means all scientific theories must not fail a comparison with reality.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_theory
Quote: "The strength of a scientific theory is related to the diversity of phenomena it can explain, which is measured by its ability to make falsifiable predictions with respect to those phenomena."
On that basis, psychology is not a science.
> If this were to happen in physics we'd call it it a failed or incomplete theory.
If this were to happen in physics, people would abandon it, as they abandoned astrology and alchemy.
But psychologists don't see eye to eye on anything -- that's one of the obstacles to turning psychology into a science.
> In the case mentioned in the article, even a professional that truly trusts the tests should have taken into consideration:
> 1) make his own assesment and check against the test score,
On the contrary, if psychology were a science, a clinical psychologist administering a standardized test should produce the same high correlation with reality as a clinical doctor administering a standardized test. But this is certainly not the case, and one of the reasons for this discussion is that psychologists are often married to the outcome of a test that isn't a reliable measure of its subject. A psychologist's confidence in a test's unreliable results is an obvious theme in the linked article.
> Carefull when disregarding a whole field based on preconceptions.
Tell that to Thomas Insel, director of the NIMH, who recently and reluctantly decided to abandon the DSM, psychiatry and psychology's standard diagnostic manual, on the ground that it's becoming less scientific with each new edition:
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/side-effects/201305/the-...
My point is that, when a field's opinion leaders disregard a whole field, it's no longer a preconception.
> All fields have different branches and disagreements.
When a medical doctor says you have cancer, it's 99% certain you have cancer. When a psychologist says you have Asperger Syndrome, the reliability of the diagnosis is so unreliable and divorced from reality that the diagnosis has been reluctantly abandoned after an epidemic of phony diagnoses.
The same pattern applies to most other psychological diagnoses and decisions -- they are very subjective. Tom Widiger, who served as head of research for DSM-IV, says "There are lots of studies which show that clinicians diagnose most of their patients with one particular disorder and really don't systematically assess for other disorders. They have a bias in reference to the disorder that they are especially interested in treating and believe that most of their patients have."
> I think it's because of it being a young field ...
Psychology and psychologists have been around making pronouncements since before the U.S. Civil War. That makes psychology one of the oldest fields that has scientific pretensions.
> it's hard to agree on what the standards are to measure good/bad practice.
Yes, true, which is why psychology is now being replaced by neuroscience -- the latter can produce more objective results.
I don't know if you meant by including that link that psychologists criticising psychiatrists undermines their credibility, but if that's the case I disagree strongly.
Not so. The DSM is the central authority and diagnostic manual for both psychiatry and clinical psychology. Reference:
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/more-diagnosis/201003/ho...
> I don't know if you meant by including that link that psychologists criticising psychiatrists undermines their credibility ...
I included the link only to show that the DSM is being abandoned by mental health professionals, not to suggest a schism between psychiatry and psychology. The latter has been true for decades and goes without saying.
From what I have seen the only useful function for HR in the highering process is a background verification check. Aka did John Smith work at your company from 2000-2004. Anything else is risky.
HR is ideally the former and not the latter.
The job, and the working environment in particular, was horrible and I didn't stay after my probation period.
On the other hand, I was put on a dead end project and the company, despite being a rather small one, was like a big corporation where you can hide without doing anything and still get paid.
I actually read a few thousand pages of Intel programming manuals and wrote not one but two toy operating system projects and got paid for it!
At the time I thought it was a hoax, after your story I'm not so sure.
Now, I'm just a software engineer, but I can't really get my head around the idea a software company hiring lots of supposedly smart people, subjecting them to this sort of nonsense, and then make it obligatory to take it seriously. To me, that sounds like a recipe for trouble.
You are correct. It is demonstrably going to lead to bad outcomes:
Is the CEO supposed to be up on all the HR rules? Is the CEO out in the market calibrating salaries every day? Does the CEO have time to analyze optimal organization designs? Should the CEO do all the initial fit screens? Chase down background checks?
If HR is an issue, it's because they're being asked to do the wrong thing, or the individual is incompetent. Saying "We don't need HR because they are poor technical interviewers" is like saying "We don't need accountants because I don't like the expense report form." You still need accountants, and you still need HR.
> "Is the CEO out in the market calibrating salaries every day?"
No, but neither should this be a HR responsibility. HR has no fucking idea how well someone is doing, nor can they be reasonably expected to since they neither work with these employees daily, nor do they have domain knowledge of what they do. Raises and promotions need to be handled by someone with the correct background - CTO for small companies, VPs for larger ones.
HR should not be handling raises.
> "Does the CEO have time to analyze optimal organization designs?"
YES. Emphatically yes. He/she's the Chief Executive Officer, the structure of the company is entirely their business. HR has no substantial insight into the specific needs of the business structure, if they did, shit, fire the CEO and make HR the boss.
The CEO is a manager first and foremost, and organizational design is one of the most fundamentally important parts of the position. Letting HR do this is abdicating a primary responsibility of the role.
> "Should the CEO do all the initial fit screens?"
Yes, for small companies. No, for larger companies, but neither should it be HR. Again, HR has no idea how the team dynamics in your company works. Who do you think is a better judge of culture fit - the CTO/VP who's interacting with the team daily, or the HR person who rarely speaks to any of the engineers? Once again this is very much a CTO/VP role.
> " Chase down background checks?"
This is pretty much the only thing in your list that I'd say firmly belongs to HR. HR administrates benefits, HR mediates disputes, HR performs the clerical duties in hiring - including background checks. HR is not a decision maker any more than you'd let your accountant make strategy decisions for your company.
If they're spending their time on Glassdoor figuring out what DBAs get paid when they could be at a customer the customer suffers. Much more efficient for HR to do it. Much better to let a specialist propose an organization design to get the firm from 10 people to 100. Let the HR person do the research, let the CEO decide. If the CEO is reading all the books on org design instead of being in front of VCs, there won't be funding.
> Is the CEO out in the market calibrating salaries every day?
HR should not be setting compensation. That's a business question and something the business people need to understand and deal with.
> Does the CEO have time to analyze optimal organization designs?
Organizational structure is also a business question. It goes directly to what sorts of team structures, etc, are most effective in delivering the company's product.
> Should the CEO do all the initial fit screens?
Not necessarily the CEO, but some technical person should do the initial fit screens.
> Chase down background checks?
This is the sort of thing HR should do.
I read "out in the market calibrating salaries" as gathering market information which serve as an input for management in making compensation decisions.
It's management's (really the CEO's) job to apply it. Is it a company that want to pay median salaries with lots of benefits? Low base relative to the industry, but lots of bonus and equity? Lots of cash? All these are the CEO's decision, but they shouldn't be the ones gathering the data.
I've also seen (unhealthy) environments where HR's primary job was to protect the company from lawsuits. That's not great either.
In general I've counseled people not to put their career in HR's hands, but that's still a long way from calling it a near-useless function. It frequently turns out that way, but it has the potential to be much more.
Optimal for what? I do think the CEO or someone similar needs to figure out what you want from the organization and design it. HR may have input but it is just input.
HR can do the market calibration research. That's a good role for them. Initial fit? That should be the team or team manager. Background checks? Either HR or an administrative assistant somewhere.
Without HR, that work should fall upon the team manager and maybe some assistance somewhere. It can be done though.
Bottom line, yes, there is a role for HR, I think. No, I don't think it is a big role.
[1] paperwork, monthly company events, ...
The point is that bringing someone onto the team and seeing if that is a good fit, is something that belongs at the team level. Some of the support could be done by a small HR department, or the old fashioned way, by an administrative assistant.
Dunno what HR does in the US, but here in the UK I know a lot of cases where a decent HR person would have saved companies millions in payouts to now ex-employees who sued them. In several cases, the business was made bankrupt, jobs lost.
Keep HR people
Keep business
Edit: Format.
First, personal interviews can be poor predictors of future hire performance. People will often hire someone who resonates on a personal level, or who is otherwise charismatic, rather than for the right skillset. Standardized tests, administered correctly, are one way of reducing the variability.
And variability is pain. Your HR and hiring people are likely being judged just the way everyone else is. Hiring, or forcing dev teams to interview, a lot of low-quality candidates without an effective screen is a good way to find yourself being replaced.
The second is that, as people are fond of saying, the standard you walk past is the standard you accept. This is the source of a lot of foolish "musts"––candidates must have a certain GPA, or only go to a certain school, or they have to hit a certain percentage on some tests. Having standards is all well and good until you find a case that doesn't fit your profile and you either get flexible or look foolish.
Being flexible means that other hires complain that you're lowering your standards, and no one likes hearing that either.
The test in this case wasn't correctly administered, as columbo pointed out elsewhere, and I agree that hiring managers shouldn't have a veto over technical hires. But this is the sort of human-dynamics problem that can't be solved by firing entire departments. If you don't address the problem head-on it'll just come back next year in a different form.
In my limted experience this is much more of a problem in big companies than small. In small companies, employees know each other as fellow human beings from the owner to the interns. In big companies, the humans are numbers in a computer to be ranked, graded, and filed yearly.
They had their nose pretty deep in payroll operations; we were always paid correctly and on time. Insurance problems? They'd help. They were frankly pretty decent service providers for us.
Unfortunately this is extremely rare in corporate life.
Most HR people are at least somewhat competent and help the company, and good HR people are worth their weight in silver. When Human Resources actually understands the needs of the employees and is able to enact policies that make them happier, that's extraordinarily useful.
But yes, at my last job interview, I succeeded at the technical interview but failed at the 'personality' one. It's a loss for them, not for me.
What makes you think HR people are any better than we in hiring those ones? (Hiring other HR personal excluded, they are probably good on that, the same way that we are good on hiring techies.)
I don't have an answer to your question, but I'm quite confident that it isn't "you ask a psychologist".
It's not obvious to me that this is what actually happened here.
I worked for many years at an organisation that had a similar policy - if I wanted to hire someone that the psych evaluation had flagged as no-hire, then I needed the approval of my boss's boss.
HR didn't invent that policy on their own. They recommended it to the CEO/Management Team because they saw the number of bad hires that were coming up where the hiring manager ignored the psych eval and then all the issues that the eval predicted came true.
I didn't love the rule - particularly when the issue was something like this person you're trying to hire for a relatively boring entry level role doesn't have a lot of ambition or initiative - but it was a specific response to an identified problem. Perhaps the wrong response, perhaps not, I'm still not sure.
But what it wasn't, was an HR dept that set their own rules. Their authority was purely to enforce the CEO's decisions on hiring policy.
Because the author of this article doesn't seem to know much about the origin/nature of the policy in his organisation, it's hard to tell whether he ran into the CEO's rule, or HR's rule.
The decision to give the test in English to someone who wasn't a native English speaker is a mistake, but it might be the candidate's mistake.
My organisation gave candidates the choice of language in which to take the test, and strongly advised them to take it in their native language. Every so often we'd see someone who didn't listen to that (possibly because they didn't want us to think that they weren't confident in their english skills) and it showed.
Based on the information provided in the blog post, I'm still not sure whether the wrong decision was made or not. There were clearly mistakes in the process, but we don't know who made them, and there's no way to know whether the psych eval was accurate or not since the hire never went ahead.
Step 4: Lose a trivial discrimination / disability / wrongful termination suit because you didn't keep the right paperwork.
I don't know how you feel about silly software patents being used to extort money from companies, because trolls know it will be cheaper to settle than to fight.
The same thing can and does happen with labor law.
Obviously some claims have merit and deserve to be heard by a court and get some reasonable relief.
At the same time, just as there are "patent trolls", there are "employment law trolls".
In contrast, most software patent disputes are simply businesses extorting other businesses because they can, rather than because they were harmed and deserve to recover damages.
The two are not really the same. Generally speaking, when a company damages a human, it should pay what it owes rather than trying to weasel out of the situation.
In the U.S. legal system, you can sue anyone for anything, and it will cost them _something_ to make you go away. It's not hard to come up with _some_ claim that's not obviously absurd enough to get dismissed quickly. There are individuals who realize this --- as well as attorneys who have an economic interest in helping more people realize this.
So again, I grant that many claims have merit. But I don't think you can stipulate that every employee claim is automatically valid, i.e. that every company is automatically guilty of every claim against it. Sometimes companies suck. And sometimes so do employees. It's life.
BTW, suing for wrong doing is NOT parasitic. Its often the only recourse avaliable with bad employers
One of the folks who worked for me several years back had complaints filed against her by an employee whom she had woken up from a dead sleep during the day a few times. (The employee was working from 6-2AM as a night clerk at a hotel) The employee claimed that although the supervisor had 5 employees, she only checked his sleep/wake status, and did so because he was a member of a protected class. (Yes, really)
This nonsense required administrative hearings with the human rights commission/eeoc and untold gobs of paperwork. The HR people saved the day, and were able to use the good processes that they had in place to keep an awful situation from getting worse.
I wish my startup could afford to have an HR person to administer health benefits, run payroll, track receipts, and so on.
If they needlessly block good hires, that's a bad thing, but I'd rather not be responsible for dealing with administering my own pension or benefits.