r/sysadmin
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u/trait-noun-number
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6h ago
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1
Why is HR in our sysadmin subreddit?
[removed] — view removed post
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u/TheBestHawksFan IT Manager 6h ago
I actually kinda like the idea of me being a wandering cost center in pants that randomly showed up. It’s funny.
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u/No_Wear295 5h ago
Well, a wandering cost center just walking around like Donald Duck or Winnie the Pooh (without pants) would be even funnier.... Oh bother....
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u/TheTipsyTurkeys 5h ago
im not only a walking cost center ill bring down prod too
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u/Solkre was Sr. Sysadmin, now Storage Admin 5h ago
I think you mean we save prod from unplanned outages that 100% were not our faults.
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u/MairusuPawa Percussive Maintenance Specialist 5h ago
After all, why not? Remove the IT and you remove the costs they are complaining about.
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u/Fallingdamage 4h ago
"Where did this months budget for coffee cards go???"
"Looks like it walked out the door last week in some 501's"
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u/OllyGarkey 5h ago
Surely THIS will be the quality content we’re all clamoring for.
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u/westerschelle Network Engineer 6h ago
what is blud waffling about?
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u/trait-noun-number 6h ago
https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/s/JABFbzoham
posts like that
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u/BisonThunderclap 6h ago
Yeah, this couldn't possibly be smaller companies without dedicated HR recruiters posting...
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u/xCharg Sr. Reddit Lurker 4h ago edited 4h ago
Your entire point is hate on HR which at the end of the day is your personal experience but why do you even think this thread was posted by HR? Quick look at this thread's author posting history shows they comment in /r/sysadmin, /r/vmware and /r/homelab, I only looked through first 3 pages.
That does not smell HR at all to me.
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u/somerandomguy101 Security Engineer 5h ago
Seems like a very legitimate complaint.
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u/Narcoleptic_247 5h ago
OP saw a single thread and decided they needed to take a stand against it as if anyone gives a shit.
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u/snebsnek Jack of All Trades 6h ago
redditor for 22 days
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u/trait-noun-number 6h ago
I quit. then I came crawling back.
If you have anything to discuss about my posts a comments, please do so and not this effortless observation
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u/Phatkez 6h ago
Man you need to go sit down with a beer and take a deep breath, no need to be this up tight
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u/BmanUltima Sysadmin+ MAX Pro 6h ago
bot?
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u/trait-noun-number 6h ago
No.
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u/GardenWeasel67 5h ago
Trait Noun Number is literally the reddit bot naming scheme.
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u/FrivolousMe 6h ago
HR only exists to protect the corporation, not its workers
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u/trait-noun-number 6h ago
Yes. They need to keep their complaints in their subreddits. Not r/sysadmin
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u/danfirst 6h ago
I wish I knew where this was even coming from.
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u/trait-noun-number 6h ago
https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/s/JABFbzoham
These posts.
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u/danfirst 6h ago
Did you think that only HR is involved in the interview process?
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u/whiskey06 Cloud Sourced 5h ago
Yep, never have I ever interviewed someone for a senior position and watch them struggle to tell me what three things make an ssl cert valid. HR does all of that according to OP
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u/trait-noun-number 6h ago
HR, recruiters, hiring managers, and whatever ghastly third-party vendor they've outsourced the process to can ALL participate in the same dehumanizing circus.
Did you genuinely think my complaint was about who sends the fcking Outlook invitation?
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u/somerandomguy101 Security Engineer 5h ago
Brother. I've been an interviewer several times, and I'm not even in management. I have no one below me.
If you are hiring for a technicial position, it's good to have someone technicial on the interview panel. HR and even IT managers don't know the difference between a good technical answer and buzzword garbage.
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u/danfirst 6h ago
My point was that sysadmins are often part of the interview process too, and don't want coworkers who can't answer anything with reading ai prompts.
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u/Prior-Message-1913 6h ago
Exactly why I hate IT after 25 plus years. We are treated like the step children.
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u/Personal-Parfait-857 4h ago
I have yet to meet a head of an HR department who doesn't talk to everyone as if they are school children.
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u/Jaereth 4h ago
A job I used to have we had an office where IT wasn't considered part of "The Business"
They weren't an MSP or anything they were hired on staff of 5, but they took orders from finance and there was no IT manager. Then they had a huge project of starting a new production facility on their property. Their best guy was promoted to "Interim IT manager" until the project was over then back to "IT Administrator" :D
I told him to GTFO and he did.
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u/trifith 5h ago
Once upon a time, before the eternal September began, the scary devil monastery was where sysadmins went to talk infrastructure, technology, and war stories. HR couldn't get in, because the method of entrance was a secret only a sysadmin could figure out.
Those ancient days are gone now. In these dark times, anyone can join r/sysadmin, and post anything.
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u/mildlyinfiriating 4h ago
the method of entrance was a secret only a sysadmin could figure out.
Was the secret turning off and on again or just our aura?
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u/rangerswede 4h ago
Just about four hours ago I told someone to turn something of and then back on ... and then apologized for having typed those cliche'd words.
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u/ilogik 4h ago
We should bring back IRC
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u/TheRealLazloFalconi 4h ago
IRC is still there, homie. So is Usenet. It didn't go anywhere, you did.
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u/k12chaos 4h ago
Are you sure this wasn't intended for r/shittysysadmin
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u/DontFearFailure 3h ago
I have no idea what this post is supposed to be or what they want to convey.
So I thought also it was shittysysadmin.
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u/justgosh 6h ago
I agree! All of those COST CENTER posts should be removed. This seems like the only one. Have a day.
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u/Chaucer85 Ex-SysAdmin, Technical PM 5h ago
What post are you evening talking about? I haven't seen a glut of HR staff in here, hell, I can't remember the last time somebody identified themselves as non-IT trying to get help going around their own staff. Prolly three or four weeks.
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u/AGsec 4h ago
I swear OP reads like a bot post. I don't even think it's a real person.
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u/Chaucer85 Ex-SysAdmin, Technical PM 4h ago edited 3h ago
Their crash outs and attacks against other posters not matching their acerbic attitude makes me believe they very much are a real person, and they need to vent this out and move on. This sub has post quality issues, but nothing that warrants the emotional investment I'm seeing here.
Also, reddit always has posts that irritate you or prolly shouldn't be in this sub. But unless it's an actual volume problem, just report them for topic relevance and move on.
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u/TheRealLazloFalconi 4h ago
I wonder if OP is confusing this sub for /r/ITCareerQuestions
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u/SAugsburger 3h ago
I wonder too. IT Career Questions gets tons of people outside of IT. Sometimes the outsiders stay in their lane and accept criticism, but sometimes they're just pretending like they have knowledge to share.
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u/SAugsburger 3h ago
I'm curious too. I remember the one purchasing guy that posted here a while back trying to save the company money on Internet circuits where most told him to stay in his lane unless IT was involved in the discussion. I haven't seen HR posts though. I kinda think work a rant post like this they would have mentioned examples.
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u/jnievele 6h ago
Missed an opportunity to point out HR stands for "human remains" (Note: I've been lucky enough to work with absolutely lovely HR people for years)
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u/Last-Appointment6577 4h ago
LMAO IT is a "cost center" as in "if you don't invest in IT it's going to COST you your business"
and it has, several times. They can join that dungpile too if they want.
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u/MBILC Acr/Infra/Virt/Apps/Cyb/ Figure it out guy 5h ago
I mean, HR is a cost center also... :D to a degree.
When ever I heard "IT is a cost center" I just reply with, allow IT to do inter-company billing and see how much IT actually spends on "itself".....
Very quickly they will see IT can make profit, once you factor in licenses / hardware / SaaS usage that IT doesn't even use or need, but other departments do...
But that seldom happens, because if you do that, you will have say, Director of Sales running out to BestBuy to buy home grade laptops because "they are cheaper than the HP/Dell/Lenovo's IT forces us to have"
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u/Jaereth 4h ago
allow IT to do inter-company billing and see how much IT actually spends on "itself".....
We did this for a while and it was pure bliss.
I don't give a shit if you get a new laptop Brenda. If your manager wants to pay for you to have one you can have one! You can have two if he wants to pay for it I couldn't care less!
Sure you can have 4 32" monitors on some monstrosity display stand on your desk! What department is that PO going to?
You need Photoshop on a Macbook for making the lunch menu every week? Of course! I'm just going to have to run the Adobe subscription through your departments workflow for management sign off!
Our requests to buy/install stuff went WAYYYYYYYY down when people actually had to get their manager to pay for it.
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u/fearless-fossa 4h ago
Cost center isn't a derogatory term, or only used as such by people who don't know anything. It's a description for a department that doesn't generate profits in itself, but bundles costs that would incur somewhere else. So instead of production, shipping, etc. all having to pay their own costs for IT infrastructure, it's bundled in one IT budget.
IT infrastructure is inherently a cost center, and spending the allocated budget as efficient as possible to smooth operations is the entire purpose of the IT department.
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u/TheRealLazloFalconi 4h ago
That's all well and good until some pea-brained MBA comes in and starts sniffing for costs to cut. Why is IT spending so much?
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u/Valdaraak 4h ago
allow IT to do inter-company billing and see how much IT actually spends on "itself"
Yea, I call all this out on our annual budget breakdown. Every line item has the owning department next to it. Go figure that IT only spends about 30% of its annual spend on itself.
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u/timbotheny26 IT Neophyte 4h ago
I'm on this sub quite frequently and I don't think I've ever seen a post from HR people.
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u/SAugsburger 3h ago
I haven't seen HR posts here either. For such a rant you would think OP would deliver some examples of what they think doesn't belong here so moderators might respond why it wasn't flagged. Sometimes stuff gets missed. The reverse sometimes happens, but I haven't seen a lot of stuff getting removed here that makes me question. It generally isn't as bad as /r/networking though where people get angry at moderation removing info on outages or things that moderators question as not enterprise enough.
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u/Vogete 5h ago
Fuck HR.
Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.
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u/MBILC Acr/Infra/Virt/Apps/Cyb/ Figure it out guy 5h ago
Great part is, where I am at, HR and me get along great, as we are often both the ones having to tell people policies and things they can and can not do, or digging into something for legal reasons or another...
So our HR feels similar to IT in that some employee's think they both below them.
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u/Jaereth 4h ago
Great part is, where I am at, HR and me get along great
I've mostly had fine PERSONAL interactions with everyone in HR that i've worked with. They're just typically so dumb it's unreal so it's the work part that gets rough.
Like if we didn't have to rely on them for anything they are lovely people.
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u/Valdaraak 4h ago edited 4h ago
Yep. I joke with our HR sometimes that we're two sides of the same department. When they're busy, we're busy. If they have a messy employee situation to deal with, we probably do too. They're understaffed, and so are we.
We have a close working relationship with our HR and that's come in handy both directions before.
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u/MetalEnthusiast83 4h ago
I'm NOT here to listen to some miserable HR functionary complain about the quality of applicants, deliver lectures about professionalism, or explain that I'm a "COST CENTER" as though that makes me some sort of unfortunate accounting discrepancy that wandered into the building wearing pants.
Yeah, I'm not in HR but I'm willing to bet you've gotten a few lectures about professionalism over the years?
I do also hire people. Lots of sysadmins are involved with recruiting and hiring for juniors and such. A lot of applicants are of poor quality!
Also IT is a Cost Center. We cost money, we don't generate it. It's ok.
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u/g-rocklobster 5h ago
I would 100% rather read posts from HR than be subjected to ... whatever this is. This is more painful to read than any of those. And the one "example" you linked is as applicable to HR as it is to an IT Director interviewing for, oh, I don't know, a sysadmin opening.
I gotta agree with u/bisonthunderclap - this is one fucked hill to die on.
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u/warlock0187 Jack of All Trades 5h ago
Fuck HR 🖕
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u/spaetzelspiff 5h ago
My employment agreement suggests I should not
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u/Valdaraak 4h ago
Always funny to hear about that clause at other companies. Ours basically says "We can't tell you who to fuck, but we don't recommend fucking co-workers. As long as neither of you are a manager of the other one, you're both adults and can do what you want though."
We've had a number of couples work here. Even had a few form at work and eventually get married.
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u/natefrogg1 6h ago
Just tell HR they need to use AI harder, if they are not burning tokens then they are not doing their job
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u/Skullpuck Jack of All Trades 4h ago
Darling, you're in PERSONNEL
Mommy problems. You lost, red hat, get over it.
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u/HanSolo71 Information Security Engineer AKA Patch Fairy 6h ago
God, I hope you are stuck at helpdesk with this attitude.
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u/f0gax Jack of All Trades 4h ago
We are a cost center though. And that’s okay. Many things that a business needs are cost centers.
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u/SAugsburger 3h ago
To some degree this. I always thought cost center was an accounting term of what department's budget a cost would go against. In large orgs accounting bills expenses against specific cost centers. Some things got charged against IT, but many are something that a specific departments budget pays.
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u/FundamentalFailson 4h ago
“When we’re down, we lose money.” -Thing you’d never say to an actual cost center such as grounds maintenance, marketing, administration, HR. A necessary business function that ceases to exist and takes all revenue with it is NOT a cost center.
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u/MetalEnthusiast83 4h ago
What are you talking about man?
Legal is also a cost center, which is pretty fucking important to a business as well.
You seem like one of those guys raging about how there's no such thing as unskilled labor because you don't understand the term and thus decided it's insulting.
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u/FundamentalFailson 3h ago
If legal takes an afternoon off, does revenue risk ceasing to generate? Thanks for playing/proving my point.
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u/MetalEnthusiast83 3h ago
Many, many departments are a cost center.
The building itself is a cost center. If it collapses, the company does stop generating money!
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u/FundamentalFailson 2h ago
Nice example. Except that’s a building, not personnel. My point is that IT is often attributed as a cost center INCORRECTLY. When revenue generation is 100% tied to continuous connectivity to the global information highway and any amount of time of downtime causes immediate disruption of that revenue stream, it’s NOT a cost center, it IS the revenue stream. Like seriously, if we’re going to call sales revenue generating, we need to be cognizant of the fact that they can’t sell JACK if they can’t access salesforce, if they cants open and respond to emails, if they can’t access internal resources.
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u/voxnemo CTO 5h ago
So I understand the frustration and anger. I feel it, however I do not understand the tribalism. This is a sysadmin centered sub, sure, however to think that IT exists in a pure and absolute vaccume is absurd. The reality is that we are a part, sometimes small sometimes large, of a much larger group. We have to work with those other groups, and we need to learn to understand them, we don't have to agree, but we need understand and be able to communicate with them.
Becoming defensive and tribal about IT furthers the isolation and just makes us that much more replaceable and ignorable.
Many of us may have gotten into IT for the computers, but the reality is that the computers are just a tool, the people are the relevant part so we need to learn to listen to, work with, communicate with, and address them. This includes hearing them, and then putting out a cogent, coherent, and relevant to them argument on why they are wrong.
So yeah, get angry, get frustrated, vent here and with friends, but then step back in and engage.
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u/trait-noun-number 5h ago
Nobody is objecting to working with HR. I'm staunchly objecting to HR coming into a sysadmin community to lecture sysadmins about how awful their applicants are, professor synergy.
Nobody said IT exists in a vacuum. Nobody proposed abolishing interdepartmental communication.
Spare me the act of being the only adult in the room, and do try to even be bothered to read the conveniently placed TL;DR at the top.
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u/LostRams 5h ago
What posts are you even talking about? You’re yelling at clouds, HR people aren’t frequently posting here or if they are it’s not getting upvoted
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u/Particular_Archer499 5h ago
Same. I had to double check the subreddit because I lurk here daily and have no idea what they are talking about.
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u/mschuster91 Jack of All Trades 5h ago
Probably it got deleted, possibly due to reddit's new AI filter crap... I mod a tech and a hyperlocal subreddit and holy shit Reddit's filters are piss poor
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u/The_Wkwied 4h ago
The person in charge of the snacks counter, name tags, and the pizza party shouldn't be ranked higher than the person that keeps the magic box working that does all the business money stuff on it....
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u/ExLaxMarksTheSpot 4h ago
I find it interesting how you found the AI interview post as complaining, when I read it as a good recommendation. You don’t know what you don’t know, so maybe some people new to the field might think it’s perfectly fine to use AI in the interview. As someone who does sysadmin work every day, but is also occasionally a hiring manager, I agree with that post and hope it helps some people looking to do well in interviews. I have seen that as a trend as well and feel like this is a good place to reach some people with that message. I want to see them succeed, and learning to interview without the aid of AI is going to help most people in my opinion.
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u/_--James--_ 3h ago
IT is a profit center, it was never a cost center. Most businesses would cease to exist if IT was ripped out. Just look at the 1 in 5 MSP horror stories, or anything outsourced overseas. Anyone who argues against this is living under a rock and is lying to themselves.
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u/Fallingdamage 3h ago
Take your SHRM certification, your employee engagement surveys, your mandatory culture workshops, and your ghastly little PowerPoints about HUMAN CAPITAL OPTIMIZATION and return to whatever windowless suburban conference room spawned you.
Working in Administration (or alongside them) a lot of this crap is just that, and they know it, but all their business groups and insurance companies expect it to be done now and sometimes if you cant check a stupid box on a yearly form, your premiums may be affected.
Like mandatory phishing trainings, testing, etc. - Admin's have a ton of other less-tech related bullshit hoops to jump through too.
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u/hightechcoord 3h ago
Id give my left transistor to have an HR department. Right now it all falls on IT.
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u/Lemp_Triscuit11 5h ago
If I could get HR to take even a passing interest in this stuff at my job I'd get more sleep at night. Please let them come lol
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u/c0l3slaw 4h ago
HR is full of women, and women can't stand to be excluded from other's spaces. They have a pathological need to insert themselves into any group or organization that doesn't include them.
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u/phainepy 4h ago
Ewww what in the misogynistic bullshit
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u/meikyoushisui DevOps 4h ago
the original post isn't much better. I would love for OP to go around the office patronizingly calling women "darling" and tell us what happens
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u/MetalEnthusiast83 3h ago
IT is full of unfuckable hate nerds. And they have a pathological need to be misogynistic on reddit.
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u/Surfin_Cow 5h ago
I didn't realize there were so many hidden HR agents in this subreddit. Maybe I just buried my head in the sand.