It’s because they appear to be something they’re not.

They’re usually friendly and fun and do all sorts of employee retention activities like arranging go karting and such…

They seem like they’re there almost as union stewards, to try and help retain employees and ensure you’re treated well by management. This is not the case. They’re there to protect the company from lawsuits originated by you. This means that they’ll apply rules and such in ways that are not usually beneficial to you.

They’re actually really helpful if you have issues with a coworker! However, you need to remember that despite how friendly they seem, they’re not actually in your corner, they have their own agenda.

So the simple answer is that they aren’t bad at all, but it can feel bad if you thought they were your friend.

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

Class traitors

At best they are pretty much useless for employees, at worst they are as dangerous as managment.

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 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 currently work for a large corporation with one of the worst HR strategies I’ve ever seen. Their primary focus, as far as I can tell, is to prevent employees from suing the company. But here’s how it practically works out: It is really difficult to promote or get raises for high performers, which makes them a flight risk. That is coupled with it being equally difficult to remove low performers. It takes 6 months to get someone on a PIP, then another 6 months to go through the PIP process. Meanwhile the high performers have to pick up the slack without any extra comp. No one who is any good wants to work in that environment. So what you end up with is a death spiral of talent and increasingly worse products and services. I can’t get out of here fast enough.

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

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

It’s not that they are unfriendly.

But they are 100% there to represent the company’s interest and not yours. If there is any way, to… turn a situation into something where the company gets more money out of it and you get less, it’s their job to make that happen.

In theory they should have employee retention in mind. In practice, nobody does their HR that way anymore.

All my interactions with HR have been “professional polite” and appropriately friendly. There is no reason to be unnecessarily mean, they are also just doing their job.

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

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

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

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?

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