Yep. And Engineers often have pet projects. Marketing often has a slightly odd artistic vision for something.

People are gonna be people.

Pet projects by any department that aren't in the interests of the company should be discouraged.

Especially by HR, because unlike an engineering pet project that may waste some time, pet projects by HR can significantly impact the quality of life of every employee at the company, cause people not to join the company or quit the company, and so on.

Dysfunctional HR (which is almost all HR) is just about as bad as having a thieving dishonest CFO or a clueless visionless CEO, in terms of its impact on company prospects.

In comparison, a designer who does their work ever so slightly better than is actually going to have business value, or an engineer who puts 10% of their time into some project that they incorrectly think will help the company, or who chooses the 2nd best tool instead of the 1st best tool because the 2nd best one will look better on their resume, these are all much less significant to the company or to their coworkers.

Developer pet projects in the wrong places at tech companies can often negatively impact a very wide portion of the company too. See e.g. companies with internal tooling or security teams can very often force their projects onto others in the company. Needing executive support of course, but so too your your HR newspeak manual if it's actually going to have that kind of impact.

>pet projects by HR can significantly impact the quality of life of every employee at the company, cause people not to join the company or quit the company, and so on

Reminds me of the time I almost rage quit when HR's pet project was to implement a "baking roster" for the purposes of "team building".

Like... No effing way am I spending time baking shit just because you want a supply of freshly baked goods to eat? I'm a software engineer damnit.

Made my blood boil for sure.

At one place, we had a potluck where clearly some people went way above and beyond so we decided that if you don't want to cook, you can just pay USD 20 instead. Those who cooked and baked were clearly spending way over twenty dollars each anyway. That's not a potluck! Anyway, nobody complained anymore after this one change.

A very astute and true point -- however, their unique position and role make HR employees fall into a category I'd argue should be held to a higher standard, precisely because of their outsized potential for impact on the organization.

Pretty true. But that kind of like saying "politicians are going to take bribes, they are just people".

There is the reason why some jobs are treated uniquely, and HR should be one of those jobs, as they have a disproportional amount of power and influence over other people's ability to find employment.

In some countries those special professions are even marked as such in law, for example in Poland there exist a notion of a "public trust profession": "a profession that is a profession of high social importance, requiring appropriate qualifications not only professional and health, but also characterological, i.e. moral and ethical"

I am not particularly keen to enshrine that notion in law, but we should not treat HR so flippantly.

A few years ago I read an article in a business magazine, Forbes or Inc., that surveyed CEOs and found over half of them fear their company's HR department. It seems HR has evolved to be independent of many company's management structure and answerable only to itself.

HR has evolved into political commissars, of the 1918-1924, 1937-1942 variety:

> The political commissar held military rank equaling the unit commander to whom he was attached; moreover, the commissar also had the military authority to countermand the unit-commander's orders at any time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_commissar

Depends on the company. In large companies it's very common for the vast majority of HR matters to be delegated to contractors or fresh out of college hires, with no experience managing people, and little authority.

Anecdotally, it seems to me HR employees are akin to "Party Members" / "Card Carrying Members" of a communist country (forgive the analogy). Usually very zealous about the company, usually have drunk the kool-aid, usually believe all of the lore and the promulgated principles / company guidelines. I'd think the head of state for a communist country would fear most the zealous card-carrying member, vs the apathetic proletariat. The zealous card-carrying member is the most likely to become disaffected once the illusion fades.

edit: seems I wasn't the first to make this connection (beaten by 4 minutes)

HR also plays little tricks during hiring to see if candidate accepts lowball offers. They put pressure for signing offer saying that there are couple other equally good candidates for the same position. PS - I had first hand experience. found out too late that there were no other candidates waiting for offer :|

HR going rogue with political nonsense (I can only imagine some libertarian HR telling everyone 'deal with it yourselves!' lol) is not the fault of that HR, it's the fault of incompetent executives. The issue is never one individual, it's a broken system letting a single individual negatively influence it.

How do you fire the HR exec when HR itself handles the firings.

The CEO does it. Or the board if they won’t. There’s also someone higher up the tree.

It's not entirely the executives' fault. The ambiguities in civil rights law mean that often one has to employ a more politically radical HR department to shield against lawsuits.

I was looking for a link I know exists about this. Do you happen to know the very long article, or maybe book that was written about this topic?

That's the one! Thank you!

And that article mentions this book:

https://www.amazon.com/Inventing-Equal-Opportunity-Frank-Dob...

Interesting! I overlooked that reference.

Another, more polemical book on the subject would be Christopher Caldwell's Age of Entitlement, which I haven't had a chance to read yet, but from what I understand makes the argument that the 1964 Civil Rights Act caused these issues.