My experience is different. Every HR person I have ever interacted with was either entirely clueless or immensely evil.

I've had some bad experiences, but I've never felt the need to describe them in those terms. And yes, even in the worse case

This has been my experience too. Always. Without fail.

Though I still believe it must be because many (if not most) firms invest very little in their HR departments and hence they get what they pay for and employees make do with it until something blows up; e.g. scenarios like this. And I am sure there are stellar HR departments out there I have never interacted with.

But then again an industry, a field, or a practice is usually stereotyped based on the reputation of the majority and majority in this case, in my humble opinion, seems to be lying somewhere down south.

OK; how many is that?

This kind of behaviour isn't advertised in the newspaper, you know about it only by experience, the dark side (if you choose to ignore it, please do). This is like the earlier people who said "there is no black swan" because all swans I have seen are white, no, there are events which happen without you being aware of them

33 years across 6 companies, from Fortune 500 to 20-person startups. HR departments have been, without exception, absolutely useless except to protect the company's hide.

> absolutely useless except to protect the company's hide.

But that's my point. If Uber's HR properly cared about protecting the company's hide, they would have immediately disciplined the manager involved, and "sexually propositioning a first-day direct report" is so egregiously over the line that they would have fired the manager.

Uber's HR failed here not because they only cared about protecting the company's hide, but because they didn't.

They did care but in their short sighted way. They don't really mean "save company", it means dancing at the tone of the HR boss, if they truly cared for the company they'd do something about this.

So, they just don't care about employees