The head of HR was working closely with their CIO who quit so she was the best fit for the role. The HR department is presumably small so it's no issue to absorb it into tech. The AI spin sounds a bit fake.
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alephnerd
A lot of people on HN don't seem to realize they might work in a cost center.
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.
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tkluck
Even under the AI-maximalist assumption that human workers and LLMs are going to be interchangeable, I'm having a hard time seeing the logic.
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.
constantcrying
The only thing I can imagine being more hellish than your coworkers being HR people is your coworkers being HR people who use LLMs to do their jobs.
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.
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spaceport
Having worked in HR as the only tech role in the past, HRIS, I can say w/o doubt this is a low value add move to the tech dept. However the free food stream from temp and external agencies to HR is legit insane and the quality top notch so hopefully they can share with the tech dept
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.
lemonwaterlime
Who the HR department reports to tells you a lot about the company’s priorities. In most cases, HR reports to the CEO. HR could also report to the CTO, CFO, even the board of directors directly.
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.
tacker2000
“Tech” in this sense means engineers creating internal company tools in order to maximize efficiency, so this is just a cost center, that is building custom LLm tooling. No IP is being built or sold here.
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.
karaterobot
> The biotech company late last year announced the creation of a new role, chief people and digital technology officer, promoting its human resources chief Tracey Franklin to the spot.
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.
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nickdothutton
Reminder: In large corporations, HR is mostly just a "people risk" department. People are a necessary input, and with them comes all sorts of risk. It is the HR departments job to advise and manage that risk both in general via policy and specifically from case to case. Once you understand HR like that it makes a lot more sense.
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wenc
I often see Finance and IT departments merged, usually with the CIO reporting to the CFO or some variant of that. Both Finance and IT are cost centers that manage assets, risks, audit and compliance, and the mindset behind both are similar.
Wondering about the overlap between HR and IT however.
conartist6
I give it six years for them to regret this.
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.
show comments
newsclues
Sounds like a disaster in waiting.
sys_64738
Human Resources should really be named Employer Resources as it exists to protect the company from liability for their employees.
https://archive.is/0qWXw
The head of HR was working closely with their CIO who quit so she was the best fit for the role. The HR department is presumably small so it's no issue to absorb it into tech. The AI spin sounds a bit fake.
A lot of people on HN don't seem to realize they might work in a cost center.
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.
Even under the AI-maximalist assumption that human workers and LLMs are going to be interchangeable, I'm having a hard time seeing the logic.
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 only thing I can imagine being more hellish than your coworkers being HR people is your coworkers being HR people who use LLMs to do their jobs.
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.
Having worked in HR as the only tech role in the past, HRIS, I can say w/o doubt this is a low value add move to the tech dept. However the free food stream from temp and external agencies to HR is legit insane and the quality top notch so hopefully they can share with the tech dept
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.
Who the HR department reports to tells you a lot about the company’s priorities. In most cases, HR reports to the CEO. HR could also report to the CTO, CFO, even the board of directors directly.
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.
“Tech” in this sense means engineers creating internal company tools in order to maximize efficiency, so this is just a cost center, that is building custom LLm tooling. No IP is being built or sold here.
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.
> The biotech company late last year announced the creation of a new role, chief people and digital technology officer, promoting its human resources chief Tracey Franklin to the spot.
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.
Reminder: In large corporations, HR is mostly just a "people risk" department. People are a necessary input, and with them comes all sorts of risk. It is the HR departments job to advise and manage that risk both in general via policy and specifically from case to case. Once you understand HR like that it makes a lot more sense.
I often see Finance and IT departments merged, usually with the CIO reporting to the CFO or some variant of that. Both Finance and IT are cost centers that manage assets, risks, audit and compliance, and the mindset behind both are similar.
Wondering about the overlap between HR and IT however.
I give it six years for them to regret this.
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.
Sounds like a disaster in waiting.
Human Resources should really be named Employer Resources as it exists to protect the company from liability for their employees.