That is a terrible reason to merge departments. You want people with similar tasks who need to communicate the most be closer together. Putting unrelated people into a department is an easy way to create conflict and dysfunction.
>The head of HR was working closely with their CIO who quit so she was the best fit for the role.
Very consistently work places where people in important management positions had no clue about what the people under them actually do where the worst places I worked at. At the same time having superiors who understand your work makes communications with them much easier.
Having a person with no tech experience leading a tech department is a very easy way to create a terrible tech department.
> Having a person with no tech experience leading a tech department is a very easy way to create a terrible tech department.
Oh yes, I agree. It sounds like a terrible idea overall.
I'd shorten that to "You want people who need to communicate the most be closer together."
The worst thing to ever happen at a video game company I worked at was when they separated the art department from the programming department. Artist needed to communicate with programmers and visa versa to make the best product. Instead they got siloed by department and the communication went south. Programmers didn't easily learn pain points and needs of artists and artists didn't learn how to use the latest features because communication became harder
There is an eternal cycle of bringing a function together, then decentralizing it, and repeating. No matter what you do, someone is going to find it convenient and someone else will find it inconvenient.
I agree with this. Having a tech person lead the tech department creates a reasonable floor for output of the team.
However, I think the ceiling is higher when a non-tech person is leading the group. When a tech person is leading the group the ceiling is (roughly) their technical ability. The non-tech person can be more open to new ideas, alternative approaches, flexibility, change, etc. because they don’t have the same built-in biases and preconceived notions as a tech person.
Again this is a risky approach and has a high failure rate but the biggest wins can be massive.
Wrong. The person fundamentally does not understand what the employees are doing and can not make informed decisions. You are correct that the decisions will include more "out of the box" thinking, but this will make the entire department a torture chamber for the employees as they are suffering under decisions which are obviously nonsensical and counter productive. Prioritizing novelty over competency is a road straight to dysfunction.
The people who are the best at implementing new concepts are the rare cases of people who have both a deep technical foundation and great leadership skills. Those actually can come up with new Ideas which work.
Lol sorry I didn’t realize.
At some point, enough of your technical people leaving because they have lost hope for a better future. That is a way that any once-healthy company can die.
It's like accounting is for them - back office infra that you need to keep the lights on, but nothing else.
I don't follow the logic that undermining that infrastructure is therefore harmless. Stop keeping the lights turned on regularly, and your researchers are unlikely to keep showing up to their jobs. Stop maintaining the IT infra and eventually it will be kludge that makes people hate using it. Stop supporting HR and eventually when your employees need HR they won't trust HR.
In any company all the employees know there are two sets of values at play. There's the declared values, which get printed up with nice graphic design, and then there's what the company actually incentivizes and shows that it cares about through its actions. Show through your actions that you don't care (despite saying you do) and people will get the message you say you aren't sending.
With these kinds of change-ups the message is "if AI isn't the solution, then you're the problem"
Employees are human resources.
The point of that quip is that Human Resources does not focus on the humans as nouns, meaning as humans.
Human technology, human race, human rights, human error, human nature, human history, human power. Always an adjective.
I still cant think of a common noun usage, let alone an alternative noun reading for human resources. People don't say "hello human".
It is weird to see comments talking about "HR" as some euphemism or double speak. Maybe I'm the outlier, but I don't understand any other meaning besides managing the resource that is humans.
That covers lots of things- managing the liability, procurement, retention, firing, of the workforce.
Do people really think "HR" is the resource?
I'd vote for the old terminology: Personnel Department.
In any organization, a resource can vary from things such as land, chemicals, machines, humans, books, etc.
The term Human Resources seems accurate to a refer to a group of people that deal with the humans in the organization.
I do not see why “resources” is seen as having a negative connotation in this context. Of course, just like a family can mistreat a resourceful family member, so can any organization mistreat a human resource.
Not that accurate, in my view: a resource is something that's a positive thing to be exploited.
"Human resources" in most companies are not there primarily to exploit the employee to their full potential/productivity/burnout level. They're there to protect the company from the employees!
Beyond this they’re also often key players in recruitment marketing, employer branding, hiring and selection, understanding the broader employment market to ensure pay and benefits are inline with desired industry norms, health and wellbeing, and the list goes on.
None of this is ever perfect and, of course, we can all think of companies where it’s been highly dysfunctional.
But, nonetheless, claiming all they do is protect the company from employees is still too reductive.
> But, nonetheless, claiming all they do is protect the company from employees is still too reductive.
I didn't claim that that is all they do; I'm claiming that that is their primary purpose.
A con almost on par with the term “global warming” and “climate change.”
LLMs are not going to go on parental leave; have various protected statuses; have worker protection, visa issues or a compensation structure. In other words, there's no synergy at all from having them be managed in the same way as actual human resources. (And I'm sorry for using the term human resources unironically -- that just follows from the AI maximalist assumption.)
There's maybe some synergy in workforce planning, but if HR was doing that then there's already something broken in the business. HR is supposed to contribute legal expertise first, cultural and team dynamics expertise second, and process expertise not at all.
The best thing you can ever do for your career is try to understand how your job directly generates value for customers in a visible manner. If your job does not, transfer to a team where that does hold, change jobs, or learn how to play politics.
Fundamental research is critical, but needs to be funded by governments because the lead time is long. Ideally, private sector commercial partners are also found to help commercialize fundamentals research once it is shown to be viable in the market as an application.
The whole point of innovation and engineering is to find a solution to a problem.
The idea of “cost center” vs “profit center” is an outdated holdover from a Jack-Welch-style conglomerate approach to management where departments are pitted against each other. As the other commenter implies, it’s a great way to starve R&D. It’s also a great way to create silo’d, fractured operations.
In contrast, a unified approach to managing the business encourages collaboration and complementary decision making. It also reduces the opportunity for internal politics to distort decisions. Specifically it takes sales out of the driver’s seat, a place they previously accidentally found themselves by virtue of being “the profit center.”
I agree that every employee should be able to articulate how their work creates value. But that’s not the same thing as getting out of a “cost center.”
R&D can show proof of direct customer value, or a path to generating customer value.
Managing compute infra for a pharma company or an accounting department calculating deferred revenue for a tech company does not, hence why software spend is low in pharma companies and accounting related roles tend to be contracted out in tech companies.
> The idea of “cost center” vs “profit center” is an outdated holdover from a Jack-Welch-style conglomerate approach to management where departments are pitted against each other
Every company has a finite amount of budget, and every function is arguably as important as the other. You need to prioritize.
Every dollar spent by a pharma company on compute is arguably a dollar that could be directly attached to IP generation. Similarly, every dollar spent on an accounting team in a tech company is a dollar lost thet could be attached to software R&D.
> a unified approach to managing the business encourages collaboration and complementary decision making
I absolutely agree, but people on HN need to realize that depending on the industry, software is lower on the hierarchy of needs. And this is why it's best as a SWE to target tech-first companies or move geos to work in a tech cluster.
I've been wondering recently when boards of directors will realize that the role of CEO might quite acceptably be split into two parts: an executive, who makes decisions to implement a high-level vision based on data and cold-blooded analysis, and (for lack of a better word) a culture head, who is the public face of the company, and keeps relationships with people, and gives inspiring speeches, and so on.
The executive part, it seems to me, might quite adequately be replaced by an AI. I don't even mean a hypothetical future AI, I mean literally the level of GPT models we have today. People's response to this is often "but what about genius visionaries like Steve Jobs?" and I admit that they can't be replaced. But, I'm talking about the median CEO, of the median corporation. Or even the bottom 80%, maybe. I don't think that part of their job is safe from AI in the medium term, except by gatekeeping and inertia. I firmly believe AI could do as good a job at that than most CEOs, and better than many, more cheaply, and more predictably.
(Everybody else's jobs aren't safe from AI, of course. It's just a matter of AI agents working up the ladder of complexity, from intern-level work, to junior, then senior, and so on. An important assumption here is that the executive part of being a CEO is not particularly difficult, or different from what AI has been shown to excel at already. Just that once the decision maker's job is in danger of being replaced, there will all of a sudden be a lot more skepticism about AI's ability to do human tasks.)
The other half of that split, the inspiring networker with amazing soft skills, who is good at driving the company culture and building relationships, would be harder to replace with an AI for the foreseeable future. Because they're not as good at it right now, and because people don't want to be led by a machine. That'll be true for a generation at least, but I imagine that could change as well. Things get normalized, and people's expectations change when their experience changes.
What Moderna just did is not what I've described above, but it does feel like a step toward it.
This has always been a thing. This is why Chief Product Officer, Chief Operating Officer, Chief of Staff, and other similar roles exist.
To understand who is going to be replaced by AI and in what order, I think you have to stop reasoning based on what is possible or effective or a good fit and just think more about the politics of power, moats, who benefits from distribution of responsibility /liability, etc.
Executives and lawyers will absolutely be the last jobs standing even if it might seem like they could be the first on the chopping block.. reverse is true for software engineers.
As with ideas, what really makes a company work is execution. That takes people. Even with AI, it’s still people who are directing the AI, and connecting its work to the parts that AI can’t do yet. Which means the number one job of a CEO is recruiting, retaining, aligning, and inspiring people.
So the internal and external jobs of a CEO in 2025 are really mostly the same job: communicating a vision and getting people to execute it. It’s not that different for staff vs investors.
To be more specific, the split you propose is really like 5% / 95% in favor of the soft skills. Any decision that can be made with data and analysis is already being made one or more levels below the CEO. That shift happened years ago with the rise of ERP software.
In this case it seems that HR has shifted from reporting to the CIO to reporting to the CTO. Such a move on its surface could indicate close knit arrangements regarding hiring, technology used by the devs, and even the possibility of HR using more tech to perform their own duties.
For instance, there might be more tech savvy people actually doing the screening itself due to close proximity to the tech department. Less siloes could mean better devs get through the early stages of the interview process that could normally be erroneously or prematurely filtered out.
Therefore I can understand the approach of combining it with HR in this case, since efficiency also means replacing humans with machines and saving costs there. Now that AI is getting big they can think of more areas where human work is getting superfluous.
The question is how far this can go and how much human labor they can turn into LLM responses.
Also just to say it if you don't know it, HR is the biggest "rules for thee, not for me" group in your org. Everything bad you have ever imagined, it's worse.
Wondering about the overlap between HR and IT however.
constantcrying•7mo ago
This is just guesswork, but I think it is likely that HR came under serious pressure as many of their jobs started to become very obviously obsolete. So the HR chief came up with a plan to combine her irrelevant department with an actually still relevant department, in a bid to maintain corporate power.
There is no real business case behind this. Even the article fails to provide any coherent reason for this nonsensical merger.
everdrive•7mo ago
constantcrying•7mo ago