

Things HR Won't Tell You  - georgecmu
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303491304575188023801379324.html?mod=WSJ_hpp_sections_careerjournal

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tptacek
HR also won't tell you that they report to the CFO, that their performance is
measured almost entirely in terms of managing fully loaded headcount cost,
that they have virtually no incentive whatsoever to help you in any way, that
no clueful manager in the company wants to hire through their candidates
because the good candidates find the real hiring manager themselves, that
despite no particular qualifications to do so they are often solely
responsible for determining the structure of your health benefits, and that as
a pure cost center perched anomalously close to the top of the org chart with
access and alleged influence over compensation information they are one of the
most political divisions in the company.

Basically, that they're evil.

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justinph
This. HR Never works for you. HR works for management.

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gaius
The purpose of HR, in a nutshell, is to protect the company from its own
employees. In practice "the company" means "senior management".

They have a secondary purpose as well, which is to perpetuate their own
existence. And, that's all.

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barrkel
Enforced arbitration clauses strike me as the most worrying thing. As
described, it amounts to signing away your statutory rights and submitting to
some form of private justice, somewhat like a non-free person. The most
horrific case I've heard about is of course the Jamie Leigh Jones one.

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cdr
Private arbitration as it currently stands in the US is hopelessly broken.
There are numerous conflicts of interest for arbiters, all favoring employers.
As the article says, arbiters find in favor of employees in 30% of cases _at
best_. I'd prefer to see mandatory arbitration made completely illegal until
it can be fixed - if it can be fixed.

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tedunangst
Is it really valid to assume that fair decisions should be split 50/50?

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nostrademons
Probably not, but if you _know_ that arbitrators are paid by the employer, and
will be doing repeat business with the employer, and then find for the
employer 88% of the time, it ought to raise a few eyebrows.

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iamdave
I've sort of held the belief that as time went on, towards the latter half of
the early 2000's decade that employers apparently woke up, and realized that
people are either (A) desperate to have jobs or (B) desperately hoping they'll
still have theirs in the morning and used the opportunity to squeeze whatever
control they could out of the fact.

So little worker bees in the office are so terrified that anything as much as
a sneeze will get them fired because there are thousands more people ready and
willing to take that position.

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Qz
This is exactly the mentality that makes many Americans so paranoid about
immigrants.

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iamdave
I understand your point, but I'm not worried about an illegal immigrant taking
my Sys Admin job. And that's the general argument that I try to support.

"They're taking our jobs"

Correction, they're taking the jobs Americans are often too lazy or too
elitist to apply for, when out of work. Manual labor isn't beneath anyone,
present company included-but statements along the lines of immigrants taking
jobs seems to indicate that's how people really think.

~~~
gcb
in california i hardly see any american.

Be it in the streets, in the bars, in the fortune 500 offices...

My guess is that the entire state is a piramid scheme for immigrants

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nostrademons
Many of the people you assume are foreigners were probably born and/or raised
in this country. A bunch of them probably had parents that were born or raised
in this country.

Don't confuse ethnicity with citizenship.

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_delirium
It's not _that_ unlikely that a randomly chosen person you see in California
actually will be foreign-born, though, since about 1 in 4 people in the state
were born outside the country.

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nostrademons
There's a big difference between "hardly see any" and "75%".

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gcb
i may not be distributed accros the state like the statistic :)

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alanthonyc
Excellent timing for me. Just this past week, I set up a Wufoo form as a
performance review for myself. I asked a bunch of users at my current client
to fill it out to let me know how I've been doing. I thought it would be
useful for me, since I don't have any formal feedback mechanisms as an
independent consultant.

Everyone was happy to oblige and several filled out a form. Then I got a call
from someone who, just on a whim, decided to check with HR first. That's how
we found out that it's against company policy to allow people to provide
feedback to outside consultants. This is in case the consultant gets let go
and the feedback contradicts that of the consultant's direct supervisor. If
some kind of dispute arises, they want everything to match the company line.

Having worked for these types of corporations for so long, I completely
understand how this policy came about. However, thoughts of "evil" Toby from
"The Office" keep cropping up somehow.

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pierrefar
According to the article, we should comment here about it with our views, lest
these threads are monitored and lead to our firing.

