Back in the day, the term 'anti-personnel department' was often used.

And don't get me started on the use of the term 'human resources'

[Edit] - more detail. I'm a techie but have occasionally had line management (in addition to tech lead) responsibilities. The first time I took on these duties, I had to do the relevant HR training and was amazed at the attitude: a little bit of 'duty-of-care' and a lot of 'follow-this-process-to-make-sure-the-law-is-on-our-side'

I had an interesting experience a couple of years back when everyone in our office was called to a surprise meeting with HR except me.... I had already resigned, everyone else got the bullet in that caring way that HR departments are famous for.

In other news, for a bunch of smart people, engineers are spectacularly underunionized.

Because they will be involved in recruiting, they will also have a keen understanding of how much that increases their workload, which is otherwise pretty flimsy in a lot of cases. The more churn, the more they can justify their headcount.

Which isn't to say HR won't want him gone. Just not yet.

Nope; they help the business get the most out of you without getting sued. That's the alpha and omega of HR.

Their obligations are to the company, not to you. When they answer your questions, they do it so you can't claim later on that the company didn't tell you such and such or that the procedure XYZ was unclear, and sue them. They are nice so that you won't see the company as adversarial and sue them. And so on and so forth.