> Also remember that HR are not your friends, they don't work for you, they don't understand your job, or you as a person; they work for the company; their job is to:

This part is so important. Our HR department doesn't actually know anyone in the office. It becomes particularly interesting when they organize a company outing and have completely missed that there is a large percent of the workforce that does not speak the native language where I live, but they still have event hosts that will only present things in this language. They've done this 3 years in a row now.

I had a boss that was extremely good to work for, but she didn't have management experience (given the nature of the organization, this would be expected), so she leaned on outsourced HR for advice. Not only did their advice lead to me leaving much less amicably than had been (mutually, I thought) planned, but they also opened themselves up to liability that wouldn't have been there otherwise.

The "bad cop" analogy is spot-on. I've used that exact analogy—my boss (unwittingly) played "good cop", while the HR consultants played "bad cop".

amen. there are downsides to the chaos of consulting that i don't particularly enjoy but the only time i ever spoke to HR was when they handed me my badge, and there is no such thing as a "performance review", reprimands, etc. (lots of annoying memos about corporate policies at this particular client tho). In fact, I talk to my real "boss" about once every few months, in between it is just scrums with PMs

I pretty much just go to work, chill out, and hope I can find a better gig sometime in the near future (I'm on basically an ever-renewing contract but the vendors in our system are horrible about rate increase).