Personally, I'm so sick of there not being nearly enough cynicism in general.
I've met cops that aren't total pieces of shit (who all ended up quitting in less than 5 years), but that doesn't mean cops aren't total pieces of shit. If the nature of the job is unethical, you should rightly call it out as such. HR's job is to pretend to be your friend while doing whatever the CEO and the lawyers tell them to do. They're the kind of people who are your friends until suddenly they aren't, and then you realize it was all bullshit to begin with.
You're welcome to disagree. But from my perspective you're naive, and from your perspective I'm cynical.
It is within this context an average intelligence, perhaps even above-average moral person enters after 6-weeks of training. This person likes watching football and drinking beer. They help their elderly neighbors with the trash. They are a "normal" man who will stand up for himself, physically, in extreme cases. Now give him a gun and a badge and a martial law bubble. How do you think this normal, average man will evolve when he realizes his power? When he sees his friends on the force us it, daily, to get what they want, to make their jobs a little easier? When does he learn to enjoy that feeling of power, for itself, the way it feels to beat someone and put his knee on someone's neck because they talked back to you, and know that no-one can do shit about it? And you can even rationalize it - they shouldn't have been rude, they should know how much power I have and that I'm only human, its really just punishment for being stupid. Plus, the public still loves me and is grateful to me, considering me in high esteem as a moral upstanding citizen - so we must be doing something right!
So I take all of these "cops are evil" claims with a grain of salt and seek out more context clues to what would initiate an interaction with LEO in the first place.
> So I take all of these "cops are evil" claims with a grain of salt
No need to take any "claim" as fact when there is tons of actual evidence in the form of recordings, law suits and more. I simply do not understand how someone is able to have a positive view of police with the access we have to information. Police are not your friend, they do not serve you and they should not be trusted.
And also, consider the impact of being wrong here. Like, if your opinion is taken seriously, then there's nothing wrong, then why? Is it that my basic assumption that power corrupts is wrong? Or do you disagree with the premise that cops aren't held accountable when they abuse their power? In either case, surely you see enough evidence that police, both here and abroad, are constantly struggling with issues of corruption and abuse, sometimes directed at one ethnicity, but always at non-officers.
I realize this answer is lacking, but I've had this argument so many times and it drains hours out of my day to pursue it - because the supporting data is complicated and people are correct to provide counter arguments (and then I have to respond and it goes back and forth for a while). I encourage you to do your own research on statistics regarding police officers in the US. The one everybody likes to cite is how many police officer's beat their wives - 40%. And even this data point is very complicated and requires a lot of nuance and so on.
But since people enjoy stories, here's one egregious example of a sheriff's department abusing their power. Even I think this is exceptionally awful and most police departments aren't this bad, but it's well researched and makes for a good read.
https://knock-la.com/tradition-of-violence-lasd-gang-history...
And the people that I think are those who most want to help those in need and are compassionate, careful, and would take accountability seriously are those who don't want to do the job.
There is also a kinship/bond that grows, which is hard to break. It's natural. You see it among sports fans, school alumni, console fan boys, company workers, etc... You see things through exceptionally biased glasses. Try to find a sports fan who feels like their team tends to be FAVORED by refs? You won't find them -- they all seem to think the refs are against their team -- every team's fans feel this way. Every team's fans feel like the fight on the field was instigated by the other team.
Given these things, how do you mitigate against them, and construct a police force that is reasonable? I personally think it has to be external oversight, but this hasn't been easy to implement historically.
Not discounting your point at all, but the best response when someone says this is to point out that the saying is "a few bad apples spoil the bunch". It's very literal- an apple that's going bad releases fumes that cause other apples nearby to spoil. So it's very important to find them and get rid of them before that happens.
Completing the analogy is an exercise left to the reader.
[0] - https://vancouversun.com/opinion/columnists/douglas-todd-can...
[1] - https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/deadly-force-police-...
Show me a group that doesn't do this.
In Seattle's 2020 cop-free zone CHOP/CHAZ, the self-appointed "security forces" killed an unarmed 16-year-old. It's all on video, and the statements made by the assailants in the aftermath are heinous. Plenty of people were there to see it, but nobody's talking, and at this point it looks like they'll probably never catch the killers.
I don't excuse or accept bad behavior by cops. But I can't call policing unethical by nature unless you can show me an alternative that is more ethical. Seattle got an experiment in the alternative, and it was not good.
The 16 year old was Antonio Mays. He drove a car through the occupied park and at a group of protesters. It's all on video? Not only parts of the aftermath? Where?
[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/seattle-police-carried-...
The obvious problem I see seems to be that cops exist to lock people up. When locking people up is often an inhumane and ineffective solution to the problem at hand.
Laws are equal for all people.
Order is a set of subjective social rules that keeps everything in its "correct" place.
Maintaining order often requires not enforcing the law equally. This is the essential moral difficulty of the police. If you have people who appear poor in a rich neighborhood, they are highly likely to attract law enforcement attention at a minimum. Not because they've broken the law, but because they are out of place and "disorderly".
We really really like order, by the way. You can't just do away with the maintenance of order, although a strong argument could be made that we should not enforce it via state-licensed violence.
From my experience (not all of it, but a bunch of it) -- HR has been the balancing force against bad management and even CEOs because, like the lawyers, there're there to protect the company. I've not been in a room where the CEO is sitting there telling the lawyers and HR how to abuse employees -- sorry.
Likewise, I agree there are plenty of cops who are POS, and there are plenty who are not. You're missing the part of the equation where people treat all cops like POS, and frankly -- if you've watched shows like COPS and seen what some of them deal with -- it's not hard to see why some of them probably become worse over time.
Both sides of the equation needs to change if you want a better world.
I have. Likewise, your view on policing is equally ignorant.
Like I said, I think you're naive. We're not going to agree and that's fine.
OnlineGladiator said that you would call them cynical and they would call you naive, not the other way around.
Happened to me once, I got on the wrong side of some politics and had the awkward termination meeting.
I was civil and cheerful throughout except where I had to be firm and fight my corner: “Pleasure to meet you! Sorry it was under these circumstances, I wish you the best time here!” and I could feel the barely concealed rage emanating from them.
Being in a single party recording jurisdiction was the card up my sleeve, and when I let that slip (after the termination) they looked ready to blow a gasket.
I learned valuable lessons that day about HR, mental health, and how webs can get spun that tangle up idealistic engineers… needless to say, I keep my head down and try to stay out of / avoid starting fights that I don’t stand a chance of winning.
Edit out swipes please.
In the more common case, it just leads to giving up. Cynicism is a mistake when it leads to inaction, and inaction is responsible for a lot (arguably most) of the world's problems. I've known people who didn't recycle because they were (maybe still are, we've lost touch) cynical about whether enough other people would do it to matter. The cynicism is getting in the way of action.
No, I don't have a suggestion for what to do about abuse of employees! I know this is not the most helpful, but I'm not the cynic about this. I'm a cynic about other things, but only when I do have a course of action.
You seem blind to the difference of being lazily cynical about something flawed but ultimately beneficial (and with flaws that you could help address) and seeing through cons dressed up in edifying language about noble causes. Ignore it at your own peril. A lot of very sincere communists met a sticky end under communism as a reward for the sincerity of their beliefs, and very sincerely trying to embody "googly" (etc.) values as espoused by HR may well be equally terminal (if only to your career). Especially as a slightly aspergery nerd prone to take policy statements at face value.
> inaction is responsible for a lot (arguably most) of the world's problems
Half the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don't mean to do harm; but the harm does not interest them. Or they do not see it, or they justify it because they are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves
We need people who enforce a standard set of rules onto every member of society, and yes, it will always corrupt some who wield that power. We are humans, after all. But does that make the whole idea "unethical"? I presume not.
I'd rather not live in anarchy.
What I have seen as a senior tech executive and old person is that young people entering the workforce after around 2015-6 often rely on HR to be a neutral arbiter in workplace conflicts, analogous to parental chaperones or university administrators.
What I believe the author is trying to convey is that this misunderstanding can have disastrous consequences on a young person’s career. HR is not a neutral arbiter between you and the business. They are the business.
Yep - seen it many times when employees (usually younger) say things like "I'm telling HR" or "I'm reporting you to HR", as if it's the same as "I'm telling Mom", and expecting HR to swoop in and rule in their favor on some workplace dispute - thats not there job, never was, never will be.
While you (the complaining employee) are doing that, the back-channel communication to the manager is telling them how they should probably document 'whatever' in writing so that when you eventually get terminated they have a contemporaneous record of all your bad behavior to use against you.
HR is not your friend, they are not supposed to be.
I entered the workforce a bit earlier than 2015 and I would have expected HR to be a neutral arbiter as well. My experience at different employers has proven my expectations to be wrong or at least naive. On every occasion I needed to interact with HR, information (eg. applicable laws) was selectively filtered to make it look like my only option was the one that was beneficial to the business.
YMMV, but for me this is good advice and a welcome reminder.
Employees cannot fire managers nor HR (it's in theory possible, but in practices it almost never happens). HR and managers can fire employees (this happens every week).
Employees do not know how much money managers or HR make. Managers and HR know how much money employees make.
Employees have to ask managers and HR for sick leave/vacation. Managers and HR do not have to ask employees for sick leave/vacation.
And a long etc.
So long as HR is actually equipped to do that. Such does not seem to be the case the vast majority of the time.
It’s to the point that discussions are derailed by it with folks who feign knowledge about a topic just offer cynicism. Anything that’s doesn’t work right the empty response is a conspiracy of “oh that’s by design” as if people would otherwise always have things working…
It’s endless online.
It's also always been possible to feign knowledge and wisdom with breathless enthusiasm or optimism. Fakery is fakery.
In general, we are not cynical enough. Humans have been out to take advantage of each other for as long as we have recorded history, and probably for much longer than that. Civilization is maintained in equilibrium between forces that seek to destroy each other, so you can and should assume that those forces exist and are currently and actively attempting to pursue their own gain at your expense. The heart of propaganda is convincing people to act against their own best interests. This is built into the essence of humanity.
What supports that conclusion?
Fear of being deceived?
It's a safeguard against trying to fight against things that "shouldn't be like this" and burning yourself out. It's endless in the real world too. The reason cynicism runs so deep is that it's warranted. After a period of time you turn around and ask yourself "if everywhere I go and everything I take a close enough look at makes me think 'this shouldn't be like this!' then what is it that I'm missing???". Eventually when the human operating system that underpins it all comes into view, the cynicism sets in. Sure, it's a lazy-ish answer, but in my experience it's a pretty darn good heuristic as far as heuristics go.
Clicks translate to moolah and social capital.
Maybe if you are ending up with so many of these 'horrible employees' that you need to make friends with HR then maybe problem is somewhere else.
Cynicism is just self preservation on topics like this. Most people can’t afford the risk of behaving otherwise.
That's not a friend, that's a co-worker doing their job. There's a big difference between a friend and someone you get a long with well in a professional setting.
I don't think this will happen anytime soon for two reasons.
The first is that cynicism always sounds smart. "Don't take the vaccine, big pharma doesn't care at all about your health and just wants to make money." If you assume bad intentions, regardless of if you have any evidence of bad intentions, you sound smart and people will listen to you.
The second is that cynicism is generally negative in tone, and as a result is much more likely to go viral on the internet. No one clicks on or shares articles that say "HR people are paid to protect the company, but they are good people like the rest of us".
Managers on the other hand may or may not work in your best interests, just like any friend. Meanwhile, HR is literally tasked with protecting the company from me. So I would not lump the two into the same basket.
I've been lucky enough to have experienced managers who see my current position as inherently temporary, and would consider it a personal failure to not help me develop my overall career as best I can. I know not all managers think like this, probably not even most managers, but the point is they are allowed to. HR is not.
Managers aren’t your friend either.
For sure, these actual friends at work are great. A mental health buffer, a comrade in arms, a network of two professionals working through companies and careers together.
However, the plainspeak never occurs on company comms platforms. I don’t make that friend until I’m 9 months in and can suss out who’s worth trusting. I always keep some things to myself if that friend is a current coworker vs an ex coworker. That friend is never someone up or down the org chart from me.
It’s not cynical, it’s 10 years of experience surviving and seeing other people blow themselves up because they mistake a workplace for anything but. The more of this you do, the more openings you make to be on the receiving end of workplace politics, and that’s incredibly hard to (a) win at and (b) get out of when it turns south, and it frequently will. And either way, if workplace politics is a concern, you don’t get through it by making friends-friends, you do it by making work friends, building leverage, and aggressively staying out of the way of people who want to pull the social element into work.
To quote one of the HR people I worked with, when I said I was having trouble putting someone just diagnosed with brain cancer on a PIP, "What's the big deal? I just fired someone who just had a heart attack."
The people attracted to the HR career path are basically not good people, either because they aren't particularly bright or driven or because the ones that succeed are basically machiavellian.
Personally, I'm so sick of the cynicism in general. Can we make points and articles about protecting yourself, as an employee, without resorting to such things?
As a manager in a company, I've both had friends in HR and also had HR been my friend. Need to fire that horrible employee who is demoralizing the team and not being productive? HR is your friend. Need to hire the next best engineer? HR is my friend.
Have I seen horrible, Catbert-like HR managers and people? Of course. In all levels of an organization, people can be horrible. Why round everything up to the cynical points just to get clicks?