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ZorbaTHut  2yr ago (text post)   31616 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 17, 2022

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That's a good point, and I think it explains part of what's happening, but not all of it. Eg. the numbers are disproportional: firing half of HR and firing only 10% of engineers means that the HR-to-engineer ratio was heavily skewed toward HR if you get tilt it back and still be ok.

Also, a small, anecdotal data point: a friend's small tech company that employed about 30 engineers fired about 20 HR people. The whole company employed roughly 100 people. So it boggle my mind why they needed to have 20 HR folks in the first place.

Maybe HR in some of these tech companies are acting more like a concierge for the other workers. That could explain their high numbers.

So it boggle my mind why they needed to have 20 HR folks in the first place.

Lol, that's outright insane amount of HR people.

I started working in the R&D dept for the local subsidiary of a decent sized multinational company and I remember the HR person complaining that she was responsible for hiring and onboarding ~100 new people during the spring (including all the temporary workers for the assembly plant).

In a previous job with around 30 employees in the country, we had one person who spent maybe a third of their time on HR work and the actual official HR person was situated in another country (and was responsible for most of Northern Europe by themselves).

I understand your point and thing HR is mostly being parasitic.... but....

HR person complaining that she was responsible for hiring and onboarding 100 new people during the spring

If you told me to Hire and onboard 100 people in 3 months as a single person, even if all of them were in the top half of my industry for competence and EQ, I'd tell you to fuck off. That either means you're not onboarding people with enough care, maintaining them and their experience, or hiring with enough discretion.

That either means you're not onboarding people with enough care, maintaining them and their experience, or hiring with enough discretion.

Or in this particular case handling the paperwork and administrative onboarding for people who are mostly factory assembly workers. And yes, they did get another person to help after that.

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