Asklemmy

They are great until you actually need something from them

I once had an HR lady who seemed fun, the type you could have a beer with. She was so bad at her job that she was having casual hookups with employees.

The problem with HR is that if you’re liking them they’re probably not doing their job all that well

HR exists to protect the company. The people who protect you is your union. If your workplace does not have a union, be aware that is a solvable problem.

It depends. I worked at one company without a dedicated HR department (a payroll company) and it ran fine without it. Managers of each department worked with upper management and finance to decide staffing, we went to management and if needed (I never did) upper management or the lady who did our payroll (they handled both our payroll and client payrolls) or the benefits department (same deal) for most of the sort of things HR does at my company.

I think it's bloated at my current company, there are some people with not a whole job, but it's not like they do nothing or don't provide value, they do. But like, one guy's job is apparently employee development and all he does is choose some general "learning software" that we then have access to. Gives some useless and painfully boring presentations on the aforementioned software that provide nothing of value. Then I have no idea what he does with the rest of the year. Why is that one whole job, when the rest of us basically juggle multiple jobs?

HR is not likely to side with the worker over the company.

There's also a certain kind of "hr energy" that makes my skin crawl. Like if you worked at a company called AB Tech they'd be up front in the meeting going "I SAY A, YOU SAY B! A!" and I'm just like no, please stop, I'm not that excited to make charts for assholes.

The hr person where I work now seems nice, at least. My old job the main hr person gave me the creeps.

Yes. When shit hits the fan, they are there to protect the company, not you. HR is the enemy, disguised as your friend.

You can easily find HR staff that are wonderful as individuals. Plenty of them.

But HR as an entity isn't about providing resources to humans, it's about managing humans as resources. They aren't there to help employees, though they may do that indirectly sometimes. They're there to help employers, and even the best individuals doing the job are still doing that job of helping the employer as their primary goal.

Even the best people can be worn down by doing the job and turn into the soulless drone, if they can't/don't think they can leave the job.

The only HR department I've ever trusted was at a home health agency that was owned by a single person who set the standards, and there were two HR employees that really were there to help balance the company's needs with the employees'. It was evident in everything they did, and the boss would abide by their decisions even if it cost her.

But! At any point in time, she could have completely done away with that methodology. And that's why HR as a thing can never be trusted

In the startup I worked for, the HR lead was the CEO's significant other. They had made fundamental contributions to the operations of the company since its inception and relatively humble beginnings. Once it had grown beyond a certain size, there wasn't really any particular executive position within a logical company structure for them to fill. The individual departments were run by people more qualified in those areas. I think it made sense for the company to continuously recognize their contributions (and obviously the boss isn't going to fire their partner), but HR ended up being mostly just a cushy job for them to fall into.

It was one of those companies that likes to say its "like a family", but really there's an in-crowd (i.e. the founding staff) and everyone else. I was part of the former, so I could be honest and open with them with regard to HR issues and be supported, and that was nice. But on the other hand, I witnessed HR actions related to incidents involving other staff that caused me cognitive dissonance, because it would've been handled differently if I were the staff member involved. More than anything else, because I had found myself in the right place at the right time. Because I was a part of the landed gentry, as it were. That's fucking bullshit, and the experience made me realize that they weren't actually different from other companies like I had thought.

My current employer is so large that I've never seen or interacted with anyone from HR.

An HR's purpose is to find a way to have the company give the least to employees while still complying with the law. They can be nice to you, and most will be because acting nice is part of their job, but if they find out the company will do 0.0001% better without you they will let you go immediately.

In today's society where 99.9% of the people need to fall in line to their company if they want to not die of hunger or homelessness, it takes a special kind of cruelty to mediate conflicts in favor of the company, undermine any attempt on the side of the employees to improve literally anything of significance, or make the decision to take away someone's income because they are not being 100% exploitable. Most people cannot do this. So if they become HR while having a heart, they won't last long in the job. This leaves only the most ruthless, unempathetic removed in the long run. All of which wear humane masks because it's their job to do so.

Since the only good HR is an HR that quits, AHRAB

nope. just the fat fucks that tell them how to do their jobs as if they didnt already know

Class traitors

I just view HR as a less educated lawyer who represenrs the company and that's served me plenty well.

Let's not forget that the 'R' in HR stands for 'Resources'.

It was once upon a time, called Personnel. It was Personnel since its inception, but then one day, some monsters decided that title had the word “person” in it, and, heh, well… ah, we can’t have employees thinking they are people; they need to know that they are no different from a table, a copy machine or a forklift. So some genius of corporate sadism came up with the term Human Resources, to perfectly articulate the fact that to the corporation, you are simply a resource that is classified as human. That should put an end to all this distracting and unproductive “dignity.”

I imagine that HR at some multicountry conglomerate is not your friend. In the middle-sized companies I have worked at HR has been quite supporting when needed. Of course it is also a question of what kind of stuff they are responsible for. For example, bullying is not an HR topic here, there are specific other people for that.

HR is valuable only at the margins, when someone is a real PITA and needs to be fired, or when there’s some niche legal employment issue. Which is to say, HR is necessary, if mostly worthless.

Human Resources is just a department that cares about the image of the company

I don’t particularly care about them and they seem mostly useless at my company. We don’t have any onsite HR reps that I know of, everything is more or less done electronically with them, and we end up performing most of the “normal” HR functions within our dept by ourselves. The only reason I know HR even exists is because we have to fill out our own performance reviews every year and we have these dumb SMART goals they make us do, which are the bane of my existence.