You are under the very relevant misassumption that HR is less likely to be handling a situation inappropriately
I have something called an “expertise bias” that I use to make decisions. In a vacuum, I trust an expert to solve a problem over someone with no experience in a given field. I don’t ask a barista to fix my car, or my doctor to fix me a latte. Both can screw up in their field, but they are less likely to do so than someone without experience in their specialty. I’m not a barista, a doctor, or an HR expert. Or to put it simpler, the odds of an HR person mishandling someone being non-serially abusive in the workplace is simply lower than the odds of the situation without that person involved. I need this attitutude to live; if a junior dev is trying to override the devops engineer on infrastructure, you’ll never guess which one usually wins.
A simple verbal overstep, on the first occurrence
What are you talking about now? The topic at hand wasn’t verbal and certainly wasn’t merely an overstep. We have a an insulting teardown in writing. Substantively different from a verbal teardown. I never said the moment a person loses their cool with em and tells me “fuck off man” I’m knocking on HR’s door. But if a senior dev on my team sends this flaming email to a junior dev on my team, I better find out about it and it’s getting handled… By HR.
Every time I’ve seen an HR degree, conflict resolution was a required course.
It’s one thing to say that they’re “not good at it”, but I suppose by expert I mean professional qualifications. I like to have coworkers who are proficient in their professional qualifications, and then forgive them for the things they’re not qualified in but replace them if they are incapable in the things they are supposed to be qualified in.
Maybe I’m a jerk, but I’m used to having competent people around me and having difficult discussions with those who aren’t. HR is the same as any other department in that, to me.
EDIT: I realize how much of an asshole I sound like. To be clear, I’ve got the Boston IT scene in my blood. Starting salaries in the 6-figure range, incredibly low oversight. But zero pity for people who can’t keep up. I know I need to have more sympathy than that for people who aren’t as capable in their job - it’s not like I love capitalism as concept.
And I recognize the irony of acknowledging my own assholishness when the topic is Linus Torvald’s assholishness. But then, I’m also used to HR that can move heaven and earth to reconcile a situation with a valued employee. To keep your job where I come from, you need to be so valuable that they’ll hide bodies for you (figuratively).
with your last couple of paragraphs it’s really difficult to not slip into an ad-hominem response :p I’ll leave it at that. Anyways, I stand by my original point: running to HR for a first-time verbal outburst that didn’t even involve a direct insult is a dick move and will cause more problems than it solves.
I have something called an “expertise bias” that I use to make decisions. In a vacuum, I trust an expert to solve a problem over someone with no experience in a given field. I don’t ask a barista to fix my car, or my doctor to fix me a latte. Both can screw up in their field, but they are less likely to do so than someone without experience in their specialty. I’m not a barista, a doctor, or an HR expert. Or to put it simpler, the odds of an HR person mishandling someone being non-serially abusive in the workplace is simply lower than the odds of the situation without that person involved. I need this attitutude to live; if a junior dev is trying to override the devops engineer on infrastructure, you’ll never guess which one usually wins.
What are you talking about now? The topic at hand wasn’t verbal and certainly wasn’t merely an overstep. We have a an insulting teardown in writing. Substantively different from a verbal teardown. I never said the moment a person loses their cool with em and tells me “fuck off man” I’m knocking on HR’s door. But if a senior dev on my team sends this flaming email to a junior dev on my team, I better find out about it and it’s getting handled… By HR.
Verbal as in “non physical”. I disagree that HR people are " experts" in conflict resolution, they typically are not.
Every time I’ve seen an HR degree, conflict resolution was a required course.
It’s one thing to say that they’re “not good at it”, but I suppose by expert I mean professional qualifications. I like to have coworkers who are proficient in their professional qualifications, and then forgive them for the things they’re not qualified in but replace them if they are incapable in the things they are supposed to be qualified in.
Maybe I’m a jerk, but I’m used to having competent people around me and having difficult discussions with those who aren’t. HR is the same as any other department in that, to me.
EDIT: I realize how much of an asshole I sound like. To be clear, I’ve got the Boston IT scene in my blood. Starting salaries in the 6-figure range, incredibly low oversight. But zero pity for people who can’t keep up. I know I need to have more sympathy than that for people who aren’t as capable in their job - it’s not like I love capitalism as concept.
And I recognize the irony of acknowledging my own assholishness when the topic is Linus Torvald’s assholishness. But then, I’m also used to HR that can move heaven and earth to reconcile a situation with a valued employee. To keep your job where I come from, you need to be so valuable that they’ll hide bodies for you (figuratively).
with your last couple of paragraphs it’s really difficult to not slip into an ad-hominem response :p I’ll leave it at that. Anyways, I stand by my original point: running to HR for a first-time verbal outburst that didn’t even involve a direct insult is a dick move and will cause more problems than it solves.