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Notes -
This is about layoffs in tech and what they underscore about modern economy.
https://blog.interviewing.io/how-much-have-2022-layoffs-affected-engineers-vs-other-departments-we-dug-into-the-data-to-find-out/
This passage feels obvious. Of course companies will let go those employees first who contribute little to the bottom line. Of course companies will hold onto their critical resources--engineers and salespeople in this case--until the very worst moment.
But underneath this is a statement about how many bullshit jobs are there in our economy. Jobs that are merely simple busywork. Jobs that exist solely as a way to redistribute the fruits of capitalism from those who have found a way to way to produce for society and those who didn't. It's basically a giant social contract about providing for a rather large part of society that would not otherwise be able to sustain itself.
If anything, this speaks of how deep our humanism runs. Instead of sawing off the sickly branch, we embrace it with care, doing so in a way that doesn't over-infringe on the patient's dignity (Consider how powerful a mark of status it is to provide for the weak and poor--now this status-marker has been democratized).
Thus we learn something practical: don't take anything HR says or does too seriously. They play an unpopular, minor role in the fabric of a company, relegated to the equivalent of keeping the litter box clean: ensuring legal compliance, tackling on/off-boarding paperwork, and organizing company celebrations. That, and be wary of HR departments that seem to outgrow their function. A fat, active HR department is a sign that a company isn't allocating its funds efficiently. Or that it usurps power from more important departments, eg. the power to design and run the hiring process (they should only take care of the mechanical parts; the candidate qualification process should be in the hands of subject-matter experts). Either way, it's a bad sign.
You should be skeptical of narratives that make you feel good about yourself. I’m assuming here that you’re an “engineer”. In that case, your insight into the usefulness of the HR department is limited- in fact, the better they do their job, the less you should notice it.
That’s not to say HR are more valuable than the people who actually make and sell the product, but there’s a range between “most useful” to “bullshit job”, and IME HR doesn’t fall in the “bullshit” part of that range. In fact, I can’t think of any broad category of jobs that really are “bullshit” once you understand their function.
That's a fair point. I admit I have an axe to grind with HR and that's skewing my perceptions. It's useful for me to air it out and get some pushback--thank you.
That said, can you describe what value HR brings to a company? I can think of a couple of things, such as managing the recruiting pipeline and on/off-boarding processes. Plus taking care of mandatory trainings and providing employees with an interface with the benefits & insurance. Also: tackling employee grievances. But that still means the ratio of HR-to-employee should be low. Perhaps something like 1:25 or even more, since you get economies of scale as the number of employees grow.
That's big of you.
At its core, HR applies or enforces management's decisions regarding their employees. This is a very broad scope, and the exact borders change depending on the organization - smaller organizations will include payroll in HR, for example, while very big ones may separate even employee well-being to its own department. In most cases, though, they'll have to handle everything to do with e.g. promotion policy, PTO for individuals and for the entire org, hours worked (sometimes offloaded to payroll, which may be a separate entity), insurances & benefits (including negotiations with whoever supplies those, maybe annually), internal transfers according to company policy, and of course compliance with the law (i.e. external policy). HR is a bit like the police or the court system in that it actually makes sure that the decisions from higher up are carried out, as well as keeping track of those decisions. Otherwise management's decisions are meaningless, like an unenforced law.
For a small organization, you can get away with not having HR, or handing it all to one person such as the CFO. For a big organization, HR is essential, otherwise you get chaos.
For an example that I'm closely familiar with, if an employee wants to relocate from one branch of a large organization to another (this could be inside a country or even between countries), then the person who actually manages everything will be from HR. They'll take care of visas if needed (or hiring a law firm for it, much more likely), they'll make sure the employee gets whatever relocation bonuses they're do, they're in charge of the actual numbers f what those benefits are - all according to the policy that the company's management decided on. Or if your company offers tuition assistance, someone from HR will authorize it.
It's mostly bureaucracy, but I honestly can't see how an organization functions without it in any meaningful way.
Absolutely. I think for my local branch of a globe-spanning org, it's closer to 1:100. (I actually just went ahead and counted, and got to ~1:250, but I think I'm missing a few). Spit-balling, I'd say over 1:50 even is overkill.
Thanks, that's illuminating. Now I just have to adjust my monkey brain.
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