• 0 Posts
  • 79 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: August 3rd, 2023

help-circle
rss

  • This is what makes me uncomfortable about going all-in as an “ally”. I’ve heard very dubious and unprovable allegations in my time. If you dig a bit, it always end up being very much indistinguishable from insecurity. Everyone experience being ignored and talked over in those meetings, how is the get-go explaination sexism? How can you possibly know? Don’t get me wrong, I know for a fact that some of those situations are real, but I have witnessed way too many ridiculous accusations to take this talking point seriously anymore. I am not talking about overt sexism here and bad"jokes", but at this micro-aggression concept where you can be labeled a sexist for… not agreeing with a woman?

    I can tell you my experience as a man tho, I worked with incredibly nice men who were scared to say the wrong thing or to participate in some meetings because we worked with extremely vocals and repressives feminists, and you can definitely lose your job for being accused of any type of misogyny around here. The tone gets really hostile real quick too. There is no discussion to be bad on this subject, my experience is invalid because I am a man, to be ridiculed because I am ignoring very clear evidences on purpose, apparently. Next week I could write about being ignored due to my height and I would get laughted out of the room, rightly so.







  • As the other commenter said, it is all busy work to make themselves (and anyone else who care) feel productive. It looks good, calendars are filled with important-sounding discussions, and they’re also the ones getting the “praises” when they announce what “their” team is doing in various meetings when higher ups are present.

    They looked and were very busy in the office, never sitting in one place. I think remote work essentially reveals that they’re essentially just casually chatting on zoom all day long. The decorum is really what makes things look important.

    On a final note, I had to replace my manager for 1 month, and I inherited a ton of 1h+ meetings every week. It was ridiculous, I felt like cancelling meetings most week but I didn’t want to look like I was slacking off, so I was basically just doing the equivalent of standup meetings with the various teams and devs and cutting it short. That’s it, a bunch of people telling me their progress for a few minutes a day and I was effectively replacing my manager on top of my actual role. Whenever something blocked progress I would simply tell people who to connect with and ask of they wanted me to setup a meeting or preferred to use the live chat. That’s about it.









  • Yeah, 4 employees out of 20.

    The fact this department even existed is a mystery to me. They didn’t even screen candidates or participate in interviews. It was basically 4 glorified secretaries. To be fair they also managed the payrolls, which consisted of sending the same excel file to he accountant each week. Realistically we would only have needed 1 person to keep track of whatever might pop up and to make sure the payroll system was up to date. The owners liked to screen and do the interviews themselves.

    At some other place I worked we had 1 admin/accountant person working like 1 or 2 days a week for a business of about 40 employees. Again the owners were taking care of new hires.

    HR as a department seems largely useless unless you’re hiring 365 days a year and have so many employees that you can’t keep up with all the requests. HR people are usually terrible at screening candidates anyway.


  • Holy. One place I worked at had way too many HR personnel. It was crazy. I happenned to have my workstation directly next to them. They quite literally did nothing all day. Nothing. At. All. It blew my mind.

    So why did we have so many? Well at basically every company-wide meeting this dep was putting on the biggest theater performance of being overwhelmed by “governmental endless bureaucracy” or something. So they always tried to hire more of their own friends. Temporary roles always became permanent and we ended up with 20% of the company working HR. The owner of the company, bless his heart, really could not say no.

    My experience with HR in most companies has been hit and miss, but this one example really opened my eyes. Of course if you hire people who are basically actors you run the risk of forming an HR dep that is very dramatic and manipulative.

    I can’t really blame the workers for taking advantage of an easy job and making a great living out of browsing Facebook and gossiping all day. But it really suck that the actual good workers were over-worked because other areas of the business were under-staffed. Virtually nobody else had the political impact in the hiring process HR had. Obviously this business wasn’t run by genius.