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

You can easily find HR staff that are wonderful as individuals. Plenty of them.

But HR as an entity isn’t about providing resources to humans, it’s about managing humans as resources. They aren’t there to help employees, though they may do that indirectly sometimes. They’re there to help employers, and even the best individuals doing the job are still doing that job of helping the employer as their primary goal.

Even the best people can be worn down by doing the job and turn into the soulless drone, if they can’t/don’t think they can leave the job.

The only HR department I’ve ever trusted was at a home health agency that was owned by a single person who set the standards, and there were two HR employees that really were there to help balance the company’s needs with the employees’. It was evident in everything they did, and the boss would abide by their decisions even if it cost her.

But! At any point in time, she could have completely done away with that methodology. And that’s why HR as a thing can never be trusted

They are great until you actually need something from them

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

They are basically cops. And the analogy holds on many level including that yes, some can genuinely be on your side and try to help you or fix the system from the inside, in a way, but it’s pretty much “luck based”, you have no foolproof way to tell one from the other.

The wise strategy is to be your own HR, study the contracts and the laws. If you go in blind trusting HR you can be lucky and have a good happy professiona life or get fucked.

Knowing also helps dramatically in undestanding where HR can realistically help, where it can harm and where it is going beyond expectations and is on your side.

Don’t expect them to put you above their own survival though…

I’ve never worked for a company with the shitty HR people complain about online. Must be a regional thing.

I don’t have the expectation that HR will always be there to protect you (though one company I’ve worked for had HR that actively fought upper management for things like raises and pension stuff). HR is there so the company, and by extension everyone in the company, can do their work properly. If you have a conflict at work, they’re not obligated to be on your side.

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.

In the startup I worked for, the HR lead was the CEO’s significant other. They had made fundamental contributions to the operations of the company since its inception and relatively humble beginnings. Once it had grown beyond a certain size, there wasn’t really any particular executive position within a logical company structure for them to fill. The individual departments were run by people more qualified in those areas. I think it made sense for the company to continuously recognize their contributions (and obviously the boss isn’t going to fire their partner), but HR ended up being mostly just a cushy job for them to fall into.

It was one of those companies that likes to say its “like a family”, but really there’s an in-crowd (i.e. the founding staff) and everyone else. I was part of the former, so I could be honest and open with them with regard to HR issues and be supported, and that was nice. But on the other hand, I witnessed HR actions related to incidents involving other staff that caused me cognitive dissonance, because it would’ve been handled differently if I were the staff member involved. More than anything else, because I had found myself in the right place at the right time. Because I was a part of the landed gentry, as it were. That’s fucking bullshit, and the experience made me realize that they weren’t actually different from other companies like I had thought.

HR is designed and there to protect the company from employees, they are not really your friend any more than the corporation is your friend. They can be friendly, yes, in the same way you can work for a place that “takes care of it’s workers”, but they serve the business NOT you. I mean the name really breaks it down, Human Resources. They are there to manage the humans for the business just like any other commodity. They are also sometimes called Human Capital Management (HCM), and have a focus on training/education and extracting the most value from each employee.

HR DGAF about you or me, they’re there for the company and will squash us like bugs if they think it’s good for their company.

Also, yeah, a lot of places have wildly incompetent HR staff on top of that.

HR is valuable only at the margins, when someone is a real PITA and needs to be fired, or when there’s some niche legal employment issue. Which is to say, HR is necessary, if mostly worthless.

I imagine that HR at some multicountry conglomerate is not your friend. In the middle-sized companies I have worked at HR has been quite supporting when needed. Of course it is also a question of what kind of stuff they are responsible for. For example, bullying is not an HR topic here, there are specific other people for that.

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.

HR is there to protect the company.

They will have a laugh with you, sure. Why not? And they will come up with silly games for employees, because it increases employee retention and makes employees likely to think HR is just about boosting fun.

But trusting them? God no.

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