How much Uber do you have in you?
It's easy to criticize Uber in light of Susan Fowler's blog post. And they deserve every bit of that criticism. The incidents involved are so over the line, I don't think many companies will tolerate that kind if sexual harassment. But, ignore the sexual harassment and look at the other issues: HR totally doing the bidding of manager against ICs, willingly overlooking manipulation of performance ratings, bullying by superiors and/or (perceived) "high performers"...basically pandering to power/high performers! These are smaller crimes, but way more pervasive and ruin a lot of people's lives too! I wish these issues get some attention too, and forces companies to introspect. Which companies don't have the culture where buddies of the founder who are basically early joiners and hence senior management now, or other early employees who may have had some significant contribution in the early days, and now keep touting it and throwing their weight around to bully people or manipulate systems. I wish such stuff gets talked about too, and companies start taking it seriously and clamping down on it.
Sort of like the Red Team of HR. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_team
Nice idea
Uber deserves all the criticism they are getting but even while working at linkedin i have noticed hr always try to defend unfair treatment of managers. I have seen some manager trying to put people on pip and then hr job is just to blindly support manager. This treatment was done by female manager/ director btw. Most companies hr just behave the same way and it is unfortunate aspect.
That is HR's primary function - to protect the company against lawsuits. It is riskier to admit fault. Honestly, it is sort of sad that people go into HR largely because they like people and then spend their careers screwing them over. 😐
TLDR? All I saw was one massive paragraph with no question
My summary: HR was unhelpful in the case of sexual harassment at Uber but this is just one example of a general trend of HR defending management and other high ranking people in all sorts of atrocities.
Everyone does this (exclude the sexual harassment from this list). Everyone has to do it, to climb the corporate ladder. Women do it too. People who are naive will feel under appreciated and under valued and learn the lay of the land and start doing it. Politicking is essential for getting ahead. All the greats of the industry have done it.
Can you guys define what you mean by politics exactly? It is such a loose term that can fit so many things. What is the kind of politics people play to get ahead? How does someone play it and not look like an asshole?
Wait, you moved to Amazon?!
Great point @cynic. Most here will tell you that in case of problems with your manager, the smart thing is to run. It's an exhausting fight and even if you prevail, you might end up worse off than if you had walked away. The system is perverse as depending on the weight of the evidence, it will either try to silence the victim or crucify the offender but rarely does much to mitigate or repair the damage. In one case, after about two years of heavily documented outrageous behavior, a manager was stripped of their team then quietly let go as part of a larger layoff. Nothing was done for the people who had been impacted - some had been forced out of the company, some had been given low performance ratings after reporting harassment. On the bright side, I do see Microsoft working hard to shake its old culture of accepting any behavior as long as a person achieves results.
I don't see that, same shit different day
The WORST manager I ever had left Salesforce 2 years ago for a leadership role at Uber in HR. One of his friends told me he had zero intention of promoting me and basically said join another team. I loved what I did but changed teams because of his verbal and emotional abuse. He didn't give a shit about facts.
May be companies should have a separate org within HR for enforcement of rules, distinct from other functions like day to day collusion, err, management.