There was an article which I ran into thanks to HN a few months ago[1] that served to explain something I experienced at my employer 8(?) years ago: my role was abolished (legislated out of existence by HR and/or Finance); the role was unique to me, and I had held it very successfully for about 8 years at the time, but apparently, if you have a role that isn't found in some HR Dept or Finance Dept (or US Federal Dept of Labor?) book enumerating all jobs, even if engineering management finds it valuable, it will be abolished. I was shuttled off into a series of less aligned roles, and within 1 year, left that employer for a startup.
From the linked article:
Another place the non-fungibility of people causes predictable problems is with how managers operate teams. Managers who want to create effective teams end up fighting the system in order to do so. Non-engineering orgs mostly treat people as fungible, and the finance org at a number of companies I've worked for forces the engineering org to treat people as fungible by requiring the org to budget in terms of headcount. The company, of course, spends money and not "heads", but internal bookkeeping is done in terms of "heads", so $X of budget will be, for some team, translated into something like "three staff-level heads". There's no way to convert that into "two more effective and better-paid staff level heads". If you hire two staff engineers and not a third, the "head" and the associated budget will eventually get moved somewhere else.
One thing I've repeatedly seen is that a hiring manager will want to hire someone who they think will be highly effective or even just someone who has specialized skills and then not be able to hire because the company has translated budget into "heads" at a rate that doesn't allow for hiring some kind of heads. There will be a "comp team" or other group in HR that will object because the comp team has no concept of "an effective engineer" or "a specialty that's hard to hire for"; for a person, role, level, and location defines them and someone who's paid too much for their role and level is therefore a bad hire. If anyone reasonable had power over the process that they were willing to use, this wouldn't happen but, by design, the bureaucracy is set up so that few people have power.
These observations ring completely true to me. I'm a generalist, not a single-purpose actor, but the value that such an actor brings seems to run directly against the bureaucratic compulsion to categorize each employee.
In my experience, HR is the worst part of any company, specifically in terms of understanding humans. If you’re even slightly outside their notion of “normal” you’re fucked. These are the same people who jealousy guard their power while maintaining ageist/racist/sexist policy.
I’ve honestly never met a decent human who worked in HR.
From the linked article:
Another place the non-fungibility of people causes predictable problems is with how managers operate teams. Managers who want to create effective teams end up fighting the system in order to do so. Non-engineering orgs mostly treat people as fungible, and the finance org at a number of companies I've worked for forces the engineering org to treat people as fungible by requiring the org to budget in terms of headcount. The company, of course, spends money and not "heads", but internal bookkeeping is done in terms of "heads", so $X of budget will be, for some team, translated into something like "three staff-level heads". There's no way to convert that into "two more effective and better-paid staff level heads". If you hire two staff engineers and not a third, the "head" and the associated budget will eventually get moved somewhere else.
One thing I've repeatedly seen is that a hiring manager will want to hire someone who they think will be highly effective or even just someone who has specialized skills and then not be able to hire because the company has translated budget into "heads" at a rate that doesn't allow for hiring some kind of heads. There will be a "comp team" or other group in HR that will object because the comp team has no concept of "an effective engineer" or "a specialty that's hard to hire for"; for a person, role, level, and location defines them and someone who's paid too much for their role and level is therefore a bad hire. If anyone reasonable had power over the process that they were willing to use, this wouldn't happen but, by design, the bureaucracy is set up so that few people have power.
These observations ring completely true to me. I'm a generalist, not a single-purpose actor, but the value that such an actor brings seems to run directly against the bureaucratic compulsion to categorize each employee.
[1] https://danluu.com/people-matter/