What this usually means is that the functions still exist but are named differently. Unfortunately the article does not go into any details beyond that attention-grabbing headline, but it does not sound very appealing:
> "But what if there is a case of bullying to be resolved, or a contract dispute that requires specialist knowledge?
Jackson says he expects his managers to take personal responsibility for these things (with appropriate training) rather than "shelving responsibility to a third party" - just as he used to do when managing his teams."
Is he seriously claiming that he expects individual managers to deal with employment law disputes themselves? If so it only means that they have not had an employment law dispute yet...
Incidentally: tech managers who have (nontrivial) HR duties are exactly as reliable, competent, and qualified as HR managers with programming and DBA responsibilities.
But the latter is self-evidently ridiculous, whereas the former happens all the time...
IDK, I’ve never seen HR add value to a company. They’re always a cost center and should be minimized as much as possible in order to hire more engineers.
This is the second form of personal attack I've had to warn you about in the last few hours! And you've done it before, as well, unfortunately. No more of this, please.
Also, please don't use HN primarily for ideological battle, regardless of how wrong other people are or you feel they are. It destroys the site for its purpose, which is curious conversation on topics of intellectual interest. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
I don’t still work there but checking out the page it looks like it hasn’t been updated in a while.
The company is closer to 40 FTE now, and we employ people of several minorities and protected groups, including LGBTQ, Hispanic, and Asian folks.
The President (whom I chose as my successor) is a woman. The product owner is a gay man. The support team manager is a lesbian. The lead developer on one product is a Chinese national. There are several people on the onboarding and support team who are Hispanic. These are just people I participated in hiring. I have no reason to believe the company has changed in their commitment to diversity.
When I left, the company was ~65% female, which was a conscious choice I made to try to do my part to get women more involved in tech. We went to great lengths to ensure equal pay.
Feel free to ask any of my former employees how we valued diversity and I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised.
On a personal level, my wife is 1/2 Latina, making my child 1/4 Latino. We encourage him to learn his ancestor’s language and explore their culture. I’ve lived in South America and love their culture. In fact, we are currently in the process of moving to Costa Rica and am setting up a program with local public schools where I’ll be donating my time (and money by providing computers) to teach programming to interested children.
Honestly, I find your post to be highly insulting.
They could useful from an operational standpoint to make sure your resources are being allocated effectively if they focused on process improvements for the company that nobody else has time to test and implement. For example, HR should be keeping track of performance and worker satisfaction working from home; they should have data about performance and satisfaction in the office and compare it, be up to date on hiring and salary trends and have an opinion on what is necessary and appropriate in terms of perks and salary to hire competitively. This is all useful.
There is also a perception issue, as in my experience it feels like they are usually just there to print off some information about health insurance for you and run useless exercises.
It may well be that they'll have said dispute and will then be forced to bring in an HR department to do that work. But they'll have gotten to where they are now a billion dollar company at all which is a real feat.
Or they might look at hiring a 10-20 person HR department and say "3 million a year vs a (theoretically) one-time 3 million judgment? We'll keep taking our chances"
It could be a great place to work or an awful place to work. It probably depends a lot on who you are and which manager you end up reporting to.
Besides the obvious legal risks of this hands-off approach, I cannot imagine that this is efficient in any way. Do you really want your managers to deal with things such as pre-screenings and visa appplications themselves? Or are they simply outsourcing these tasks to agencies.
They can still filter candidates based on things such as availability, salary expectations, or target universities/companies. And call them if some crucial information is missing.
> "But what if there is a case of bullying to be resolved, or a contract dispute that requires specialist knowledge?
Jackson says he expects his managers to take personal responsibility for these things (with appropriate training) rather than "shelving responsibility to a third party" - just as he used to do when managing his teams."
Is he seriously claiming that he expects individual managers to deal with employment law disputes themselves? If so it only means that they have not had an employment law dispute yet...