Imbecilin
It’s a widely held opinion in my line of work that people who work in Human Resources are dumb. With the exception of our friend who is “chewin’ bubblegum” in Maine, my experience has supported this opinion. Also suspect are the people that hire HR staff. From what I’ve seen, high hair trumps high IQ.
Exhibit A
At the organization where I work, our HR department consists of one person. And she’s a moron. Today she asked me a question about a program she uses because, as she said, “I heard you’re good at like computers and stuff.” Bear in mind that this program (ADP) is a payroll and administration application, so it’s designed for users that are not expected to be tech-savvy. Oh, and she’s the only person that uses it. Here’s our conversation verbatim (or as close to it as I can recall):
Her: “When I run the annual staff report in ADP it doesn’t show the new titles of the people who have been recently promoted; it still shows their old titles. Why?”
Me: “When did you change their titles in ADP?”
Her: “Do I actually have to do that?”
Me: “That is your job.”
Her: “I don’t mean keep track of that stuff, I mean enter it into ADP.”
Me: “I’m pretty sure that’s how you’re supposed to ‘keep track‘ of that data. How did you think it was going to get in there?”
Her: “I thought it would just know.”
Exhibit B
At a prior job, the director of HR mistakenly sent out an email to the entire staff of the company with this subject line:
“CONFIDENTIAL – Staff salaries, stock options, and bonuses”
It contained precisely that, plus social security numbers and birthdays. Everyone from the janitor to the CEO was on there. About an hour later she sent a followup:
“Please delete my previous CONFIDENTIAL email immediately!”
Idiot. That’s like putting yellow police tape around it. So for those few that hadn’t looked at the email by then, they did now. In more ways than one it was obvious that she was vastly overpaid. Ironically, she got a promotion a few weeks later. Justice prevailed a few months after that when the company folded.
Exhibit C
An acquaintance of mine is in the HR field. As diplomatically as possible I asked her if she was aware of the reputation her field has, and elicited her thoughts on the matter.
Her: “There is a perception that the job we do is not particularly difficult.”
Me: “Is it?”
Her (giggling): “No.”
Anyone else have other examples (or counterexamples, but the former are more fun to read)?
Boxen Said,
July 18, 2005 @ 3:58 pm
One more stock photo…
Experience the unity.
bluegrass girl Said,
July 18, 2005 @ 4:15 pm
Happily, in my line of work, I do not have much (if any) interaction with HR types. However, I had an interaction with an idiot project coordinator in my lab in grad school that was quite similar to your “computers can read our minds, right?” HR ‘colleague’. We were finally replaceing an old desktop in the lab with a new one, and I was alerting people to copy any important files from that machine on to some form of media so that I could put them on the new machine once it was set up. The moron (who, by the way, has a gamer connection – Scrabble) looked confused, in that ‘you’re not making any sense and I will furrow my brow and continue to repeatedly ask the same stupid questions because I’m not ashamed of my own ignorance’ way, and stated that she assumed the old files would appear on the new computer without any intervention on our part. 10 minutes later, I had a full diagnostic model of her belief system. Apparently, she believed that (1) because the new computer would be sitting in the same physical location as the old one that all files would be copied to it, (2) that this process would occur via some ether-like substance surrounding the physical location of the computer, and (3) that the files were sort of hanging in physical (but invisible) suspension above the desk housing the computer.
A. Rabbit Said,
July 18, 2005 @ 4:37 pm
While I have no real love for HR people in general and have a few similar experiences to Boxen’s, I’ve run into plenty of outstanding HR people who excel at their jobs. Its a thankless job that noone pays any attention to if they are doing their job well and everyone notices if they screw up. They are the trash collectors of the corporate world.
Boxen Said,
July 18, 2005 @ 8:01 pm
A. Rabbit, when the director of HR revealed that she made $120K (plus an annual bonus of some forgotten positive multiple of $10K) for work that she mostly delegated to her peon, it became clear to everyone in the company that her job was far from thankless. Also, it’s not that mistakes can’t be forgiven, but when you bungle a job that a 14 year old could phone-in, it’s harder to justify. But I agree with your analogy of garbage collectors. It’s not that intelligence can’t be found in the HR department, it’s just not required.
Boxen Said,
July 18, 2005 @ 8:08 pm
bgg, maybe she heard someone talking about PC ghosting and just extrapolated to a more imaginitve and spectral end. Oh and…
Fucking classic.
bluegrass girl Said,
July 18, 2005 @ 9:46 pm
As a total side note, I really miss our “chewin bubble gum” friend. How the hell is he??
Boxen Said,
July 19, 2005 @ 12:00 am
We saw him a few months ago. He’s made it to a few of the monthly Saturday sessions. He’s doing well. Still gets that wide-eyed baby look when he gets excited.
Electro Rock Said,
July 19, 2005 @ 10:56 am
Or when he puffs a blunt.
bluegrass girl Said,
July 19, 2005 @ 11:13 am
Holy crap, I forgot about that! I never got over the shock of that story.
danger Said,
July 19, 2005 @ 4:25 pm
Right before the dot-com bubble burst, my company was so desperate for programmers/QA/technical types that they actually hired some of the dimwits out of our own HR department (which had already started to slow down) into the technical jobs.
They moved one particularly dumb but large-breasted HR chick into an office across from mine and called her a QA Engineer. I knew something had to be wrong with the scenario. She tied up many competent employees with her stupid questions and I prayed every day that she would get fired so that my options would have some hope of getting back up above water.
She, and about 40% of the company, was layed off only a month or two later. Sweet sweet justice. I bet she still tells people she used to be a QA engineer.
Boxen Said,
July 20, 2005 @ 1:02 pm
I forgot to mention that in the last 22 months there have been three different women occupying the HR position. Each of them sent out all of their emails dripping with cruft: patterned backgrounds, pixelated images of balloons and kittens. The last HR pulse-haver we had would send out emails every Thursday trying to organize “official” happy hour for staff (and official doesn’t mean your time or beer is paid for by the org, it means get drunk with the people you already have to endure at work). Those email invitations were written in a font that looked drunk. Stupid P.O.S.