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.
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.
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
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-...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.