HR Antipatterns at Startups

Of all the organizations I've ever observed close up, only two have had good HR practices:

1) Startups where a founder takes a deep interest in recruiting and HR -- specifically the "keep the team as productive as possible" part, not the BS compliance stuff like payroll tax witholdings and the minimums of regulatory compliance (which should be outsourced to a payroll provider; would love to try Zen Payroll for this sometime).

2) The military. Yes, the military has some serious failings, but a lot of that is due to scale and environment. Especially during the draft days of WW2, the military did an amazing job of processing huge numbers of people and making relatively good decisions about how to best use people. The modern all-volunteer military does a reasonably good job -- especially in the mid-2000s, when I watched it most closely; it doesn't do as well during long periods of garrison or draw-down (90s, now), though. The military and USG have been at the forefront of EEOC/integration/anti-discrimination in hiring, too. (they held onto being anti-gay for far too long, but blacks (especially) and to some degree women were integrated early and well in the military).

As a potential #3, based on Moneyball and the salaries paid, I assume professional sports teams are also great at HR, at least for players.

I don't know about HR at bigger tech companies; the worst HR and hiring practices are in small businesses and small startups where either no-one important is interested in or motivated about the HR/hiring/management mission, or where they're just generally clueless. It's hard to believe those companies get to scale without fixing that, but maybe they do.

The article had a lot of good points that were over-shadowed by the bitter tone the author chose to use. It's a shame really.

Call me cynical, but if I had a harassment issue with someone in upper management in a company I would go to some kind of government agency - not HR. Why should I trust HR when everyone there is an employee of the company? Yes, the startup world has serious HR problems, but I don't think traditional HR departments can solve all of them. Also that's white/indian/asian male privilege.