I can’t give more approval for this woman, she handled everything so well.

The backstory is that Cloudflare overhired and wanted to reduce headcount, rightsize, whatever terrible HR wording you choose. Instead of admitting that this was a layoff, which would grant her things like severance and unemployment - they tried to tell her that her performance was lacking.

And for most of us (myself included) we would angrily accept it and trash the company online. Not her, she goes directly against them. It of course doesn’t go anywhere because HR is a bunch of robots with no emotions that just parrot what papa company tells them to, but she still says what all of us wish we did.

(Warning, if you’ve ever been laid off this is a bit enraging and can bring up some feelings)

  • alienanimals@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    HR are all class traitors. Their sole purpose in life is to pay you as little as possible and protect the people at the top who are stealing everyone elses’ profits. Fuck anyone working in HR.

    • pearsaltchocolatebar@discuss.online
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      11 months ago

      That really isn’t true, and you would know that if you were actually familiar with HR.

      HR, for stuff like this, is just the messenger. Some exec told them to fire people, and gave them a directive on who to fire. The HR reps couldn’t answer her questions because they likely don’t know the answer.

      Yes, the job of HR is to protect the company, but mostly that’s protecting the company from the company breaking labor laws.

      But, I’m sure I’ll get downvoted to hell because the hive mind loves to shit on HR, which is exactly what the execs are wanting. They’re scapegoats.

      • alienanimals@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        I am very familiar with HR at multiple fortune 500 corporations.

        You’re so close to getting the point. You realize HR are the executives’ scapegoats. HR’s purpose is to serve the rich assholes fucking everyone else over. Anyone working HR is complicit whether they’re intelligent enough to realize it, or just a useful idiot. Execs want and need their scapegoats. People should realize this and avoid HR (class traitor) jobs.

        • rwhitisissle@lemmy.world
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          11 months ago

          HR exists to insulate people with real authority in a business from those who suffer from their whims. In a lot of companies, your job is to get yelled at so some ghoulish C level executive isn’t forced to strain their neurons processing the emotional reality of the fact that their decisions impact real people in negative ways. It might disrupt their “objectivity” and make it harder to issue layoffs next time.

        • ThyTTY@lemmy.world
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          11 months ago

          Well, if you’re working for that company in any other role your purpose is to serve the rich assholes anyway.

        • Fizz@lemmy.nz
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          11 months ago

          Just don’t get a job in HR and no one can get fired. It’s that easy guys.

          HR is a legitimate job and serves and important purpose in the structure of a company. You can’t dismiss it by saying their purpose is to serve rich assholes because that’s the purpose of every job at a company. That’s work, that’s most jobs.

          • owen@lemmy.ca
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            11 months ago

            Except HR’s entire purpose is to insulate management. They’re not exactly producing anything

            • Fizz@lemmy.nz
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              11 months ago

              Production of goods is not relevant at all there are plenty of valid jobs that do not produce anything. Having an HR department in a large company allows other departments to focus on what they are good at and have HR handle all the employee contracts, hiring, firing, complaints, performance reviews, leave etc.

              • owen@lemmy.ca
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                11 months ago

                All those tasks you listed are really the responsibility of management. HR is basically the grease between the decisions of upper management and the reactions of the lowly prawns

                • Fizz@lemmy.nz
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                  11 months ago

                  They can be the responsibility of management in smaller companies but at scale they require a department.

        • Fushuan [he/him]@lemm.ee
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          11 months ago

          Anyone in the company is serving the rich assholes fucking everyone else over. All the money they are producing goes to the rich assholes.

        • WhatAmLemmy@lemmy.world
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          11 months ago

          Better yet, get a job in HR and sabotage the company from the inside!

          Though, the reality is that most menial HR jobs are like any other menial non-decision maker jobs, in any other area of the business, so your argument is just as applicable to, and just as disingenuous, for most roles in any business — e.g. like arguing janitor’s at EvilCorp are complicit class traitors because they enrich EvilCorp and facilitate it’s success.

          • MotoAsh@lemmy.world
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            11 months ago

            No. Most jobs do not directly involve enacting bad worker related decisions.

            An engineer will never, ever come in and fire you for some made up reason. HR will.

            You are conflating the fact that HR does not need to exist like the jobs that do the actual work need to exist. They are not the same. Ever.

        • oce 🐆@jlai.lu
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          11 months ago

          Wouldn’t that also apply to engineers working for those rich assholes? Because there are a lot of engineers working for rich assholes here who like to trash HR, starting with me.

          • MotoAsh@lemmy.world
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            11 months ago

            No. What? HR does company dirty work. Engineers do actual work. What the fuck is the relation there??

            • oce 🐆@jlai.lu
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              11 months ago

              They both prostitute themselves to serve the rich to get more money even though they are educated enough to have the freedom to choose whom to work for.

              • MotoAsh@lemmy.world
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                11 months ago

                Ahh yes, and Marx wasn’t a real socialist because he sold books for money… You are choosing to miss the very obvious nuance and that is incredibly stupid to choose to do.

                • oce 🐆@jlai.lu
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                  11 months ago

                  You’re talking about nuance after the vast generalization you wrote about HR? May beyou could self reflect on that nuance notion.

                  • MotoAsh@lemmy.world
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                    11 months ago

                    I’m not the one failing to understand the difference between HR work and engineering work.

                    “nuance” was said in jest, because that diffrence goes FAR beyond nuance, yet you still don’t see it. Pathetic.

      • jimbo@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        Nothing you said contradicts the claim that HR people are class traitors. HR only cares about labor law so far as they can achieve management’s goals without landing the company in legal hot water. It’s absolutely not about any concern for the people themselves.

        • KevonLooney@lemm.ee
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          11 months ago

          No one in any business cares about their customers or coworkers any more than they have to. Why would you think that the person at the supermarket cares about the weird story you have to tell them?

          HR doesn’t care about you because they don’t know you. Your coworkers barely care about you. Do not think people you work with are your friends. HR has no moral reason to do anything other than their jobs. Don’t rely on them for legal advice. They are just a mouthpiece for what has already been decided.

      • ThePowerOfGeek@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        I’ve interacted with lots of HR employees over the years. And for quite a while my wife worked in that field, so I’ve had some ‘inside’ insight into the field. And I largely agree with you.

        Like with any field, there are good people and bad people in there. My wife (and most of her colleagues) was one of the good ones. She intervened many times at her old job to stop out of control managers from firing store employees for bullshit reasons. Yes, part of that was to avoid the company getting into legal trouble for it. But an equal part was because she wanted to help these employees, because they were clearly being mistreated by their managers. And while not to that level, I’ve been helped by other decent HR people who went above and beyond company policies to help me during things like bereavement and healthcare needs.

        I’ve also dealt with some absolute shit-heel HR people. People who would spend almost all day spying on employees using CCTV to try to catch them doing something - anything - that they could write them up for. People who would go out of their way to hide and ignore evidence of managers vindictively punishing employees who they (the managers) didn’t like. People would use their power as HR professionals to exploit vulnerable employees for sexual motives.

        It’s a mixed bag. To say all HR people are good is facile (side note: I know you weren’t doing that). And equally, to slate all HR employees is also wrong.

      • winterayars@sh.itjust.works
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        11 months ago

        Being a shield against the decisions of upper management is the kind of class traitor work the person above is talking about. HR’s job is taking that kind of decision and turning it into something that can be executed with the least likelihood of an office shooting or lawsuit. Whether either of those things are warranted or not.

      • MotoAsh@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        “Don’t hate HR! We’re not the master, just his trained attack dogs!”

      • ChunkMcHorkle@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        Yes, the job of HR is to protect the company, but mostly that’s protecting the company from the company breaking labor laws.

        No, it’s protecting the company from the consequences of breaking labor laws like the WARN Act, which may well apply in this employee’s case.

        Companies love to break the law. Wage theft is bigger than any other form of theft in the US. What companies don’t like is to be exposed breaking labor laws, or suffer wage audits, or having to answer to pesky individual suits from disgruntled workers they assume couldn’t fight back but miraculously did.

        Every single HR rep I have ever known – and that includes the ones I knew as friends outside work – made a knowing and openly acknowledged choice to check their conscience at the door to accept and keep those HR jobs.

        You can justify it however you like, but it’s a choice, each and every time you lie, and it is for HR reps too. It’s just a more direct path to the paycheck and yearly bonuses for them: they literally get paid to lie, to hide, to fraudulently conceal illegal acts, and especially patterns of illegal acts, taking place within the company they represent, and to destroy and deny the existence of evidence whenever the rare employee who can fight back raises their head above the parapet.

        And as a person who spent years in corporate America, I can’t even begin to tell you the actual illegal (and completely heartless and amoral) shit I have personally laid eyes on, like when I temporarily had to work at someone else’s desk: a low-level but long-term housekeeping employee who was injured on the job had asked to return to light duty for a few weeks in a letter with medical documentation attached, and I had to sit there with it all spread out on the desk in front of me with a sticky note attached to it saying “Let’s draw a line under this, find a reason to fire her” staring me in the face.

        If someone literally wants to lie for a living and be the dog that eats the other dog today, that’s on them. But stop trying to act like that’s NOT exactly how it is.

      • BottleOfAlkahest@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        I worked in HR for a while and 80% of the job was telling managers/execs “you can’t do that to an employee”. It was defending the employee, arguing for better programs, planning events for employees/associates/team members. I paid for a Christmas event out of my own pocket one year because I was told there was no funding. I never got badmouthed or trashed by a manager. But after fighting everyday for associates it was really disheartening to see them say stuff like the person youre replying too. It’s one reason people who aren’t corporate shills get out of HR. You spend your day advocating for people and they turn around and spit in your face. After awhile you just ask yourself why am I turning myself inside out for these people who hate me?

        • TheLowestStone@lemmy.world
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          11 months ago

          I’ve literally never worked at a company where HR advocates for the workers. In 20 years, I haven’t seen it happen a single time.

          • asqapro@lemmy.ml
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            11 months ago

            The HR team at the company I work for absolutely advocates for me and my coworkers. Their job is to protect the company’s interests and the workers being empowered is in line with the company’s interests. A close friend and coworker had a PM try to deny her benefits (both PTO and insurance) and HR stepped in on her behalf and forced the company to give her what she was owed. The HR team is always available to answer questions about how insurance works and how to plan for retirement, plus they go out of their way to host a yearly Christmas party and other major events. The companies you worked at might have had bad HR teams, but that doesn’t mean every HR team is bad.

    • thesporkeffect@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      The people doing the firing were lawyers, not HR, but you are absolutely right. If you are told to fire a bunch of people illegally, the only moral response is to refuse and if pressed, document publicly what happened (and quit or be fired yourself).

      Following orders is no excuse.

    • recapitated@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      Ok, cut out the middleman and get fired face to face by someone even more profit motivated and psychopathic and disinterested in your person.

      • AngryCommieKender@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        Pretty sure they don’t do that in the US cause the 2nd Amendment apparently says that we aren’t allowed to disarm a fucking toddler in this country, so the guns outnumber the citizens.

    • scarabic@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      It is actually such a shitty job and while good people may find themselves in it, only bad people stay in it for long. If you’re a great person and just spend your time bringing sunshine to employees then you were rolled in luck before you went into the fryer.

    • angrymouse@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      This is the nature of the HR as a sector, not the ppl that work there. The lumberjack is not responsible for the deforestation. If you dont have any collective to help ppl stand their ground they will only follow orders to buy the milk.

      • afraid_of_zombies@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        The lumberjack is harvesting wood which the population as a whole benefits from. They aren’t taking a side of one class vs the another class. Sure I would like them to harvest responsibly but even if they don’t they are still adding value to civilization.

        HR is not the same thing. When is the last time they actually helped you? I remember once the employee health insurance was giving me problems covering a medication for my wife and the HR bitch is taking the insurance company side. Telling me how they nice they were at contract time. Yeah mouthbreather of course they are nice, they scammed us out of money and you let it happen.

        • angrymouse@lemmy.world
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          11 months ago

          You literally compared HR workers with the nazis, and you are not the first I saw in this thread, wtf are you all eating? You talk with ppl like that IRL?

              • MotoAsh@lemmy.world
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                11 months ago

                Literally no, moron. You are fundamentally incapable of understanding that workers actually do work and HR literally is tasked with protecting the boss and company. It’s their job. They’d be fired if they were perfectly moral you fucking idiot. They’re REQUIRED to “just follow orders”. That’s the point.

                That’s why we’re blaming the position: The position itself is immoral when the boss is immoral, just like a Nazi soldier holding a gun and aiming at allies is immoral. It doesn’t fucking matter that it’s his job. The problem is the job exists in the first place, you pillock.

                • angrymouse@lemmy.world
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                  11 months ago

                  Yeah, so your solution for the capitalism is all HR resign? I love how you feel so smarter even so is completely incapable to think over a simple provocation. You are not even comparing the police, the state force that actually kill to protects the capital, with the Nazis, you are comparing the HR, like firing ppl and killing ppl had a “moral” equivalence to keep a political system.

                  And to glue this shit argument you use this abstract"morality" that have no meaning, exactly like a conservative would do.

                  You are not even aware that your hate against HR is exactly what your boss want, HR and middle managers exists with no other purpose than ppl stupid like you to hate them instead of the boss, and keeps the grindmill running.

                  You are much closer to a Nazi person than an HR that hates his Job, cause your hate is in the exactly place the leader wants, against workers and not against him.

                  You are too far of the reality to being so angry, maybe you should go to Twitter, there is a lot like you there.