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pavel_lishin 14 hours ago [-]
I wish he'd described some of the problems. What we get from the article is very vague.
> While Breslow didn’t get into the specifics of the exact differences, he wrote on LinkedIn last year that, “HR is the wrong energy, format, and approach. People ops empowers managers, streamlines decision making, and keeps the company moving at lightning speed.”
> “We need a group of people who are very oriented around getting things done, and there is just a culture of not getting things done and complaining a lot,” he added at the Fortune conference.
futuraperdita 14 hours ago [-]
The difference between HR, which is often policy and governance driven, and “people operations” probably points enough to the dynamic here. He wants to avoid red tape, hire and fire fast and accept the minimal risk of consequence, and HR sounds like they held him back from liquidity in human capital.
seb1204 12 hours ago [-]
Liquidity in human capital. Sounds rife. Hire and fire right? via chat message on Friday night, hire back Monday.
impish9208 10 hours ago [-]
> liquidity in human capital
I like this phrase!
HacklesRaised 4 hours ago [-]
Hmmmmm, giant blender...
Henchman21 10 hours ago [-]
Disgusting.
mrandish 7 hours ago [-]
As an entrepreneur who founded a tech startup that grew up to a few hundred people, HR was handled by half an administrative/finance person. It was mostly just payroll, health insurance, onboarding, some compliance paperwork and a little recruiting.
When we were acquired by a F500 public company with >10k employees, they had more HR staff than my entire company. I do wish the TFA had more details on the issues this CEO experienced but I don't think he's exaggerating. My biggest issue was that BigCo's HR dept was the source of a lot of disruption and distraction for my people. Several of my top engineers complained about all the mandatory training sessions, compliance paperwork and online "learning modules" with nanny robo-quizzes. It was a lot.
The thing is, before being acquired we were in full compliance with all state and federal regs, yet somehow there was ~5x more HR burden at BigCo. And managers got all that plus an extra side of mandatory "managing people" training sessions and robo-quizzes. Then managers had to enter detailed quarterly evals and everyone had to participate in a pointless "360" peer review process that couldn't help feeling vaguely dystopian. And BigCo was proud to be the sector leader in employee satisfaction and retention. Everything was first-class, top-quadrant and 'industry best practice" yet my startup had substantially better satisfaction & retention numbers with an "HR Team" of 0.5 people and a tiny fraction the cost, time and cognitive burden on everyone.
jakub_g 14 hours ago [-]
Note: it's about Bolt.com (fintech), not Bolt.eu (taxi).
watwut 6 hours ago [-]
Lol and I wanted to commend on their pervasive bad driving.
tqi 13 hours ago [-]
Cool to see that lack of object permanence does not prevent one from becoming CEO.
lovich 12 hours ago [-]
Without examples of said problems this has the energy of saying cases will go down if you stop testing. That or the HR team told him about pesky problems like the law.
I checked their careers page and see they operate in Europe. I’ve found it very common for American execs to be surprised and exasperated by the fact that there are actual worker protections there and they can’t just fire people on a whim.
DoctorOW 9 hours ago [-]
In my experience, HR is all too willing to explore gray areas for company benefit, so any "problems" created are likely actual laws.
richardfey 4 hours ago [-]
"We fired all of the QA people, now there are no QA issue reports anymore".
deterministic 7 hours ago [-]
If you are being interview by somebody from "HR" and not your potential future boss then it is a massive red flag.
gamblor956 8 hours ago [-]
In a few months (possibly a few weeks) we're going to be reading about a huge harassment scandal at Bolt starring this CEO.
Given the volume of the whisper network, I'm surprised it hasn't come out already.
xenospn 14 hours ago [-]
Bolt still exists?!
fakedang 14 hours ago [-]
In my experience, whatever is typically done by HR and People teams can also be done by a generalist admin team.
- Recruiting
- Onboarding
- Payroll / Insurance
- Culture development
- Team building
- Legal compliance
- Offboarding
We (~120 employees) have worked with some massive conglomerates and retail enterprises too, and HR is wholly necessary for those formats. Where the line blurs between white collar and blue/brown collar collar is where HR becomes mandatory. For a purely white collar company? Absolutely useless and not worth it.
socalnate1 13 hours ago [-]
What are you talking about?
The people who do the list of tasks you described are literally the HR team.
Regardless of what you call that group of people; that’s your HR team.
fakedang 5 hours ago [-]
Admin team also handles general administrative tasks within our company - arranging supplies, managing access to resources, liaising with cantonal bodies, etc. i.e. they perform those one-off HR tasks in addition to administrative tasks that are done regularly. It's not an actively separate team within our organization like Compliance is.
szszrk 45 minutes ago [-]
So? You can do whatever internal structure you want. Who cares.
You still have to do the same job, just now with team who is less qualified to do that. But if you guys are all happy about that, you do you.
> While Breslow didn’t get into the specifics of the exact differences, he wrote on LinkedIn last year that, “HR is the wrong energy, format, and approach. People ops empowers managers, streamlines decision making, and keeps the company moving at lightning speed.”
> “We need a group of people who are very oriented around getting things done, and there is just a culture of not getting things done and complaining a lot,” he added at the Fortune conference.
I like this phrase!
When we were acquired by a F500 public company with >10k employees, they had more HR staff than my entire company. I do wish the TFA had more details on the issues this CEO experienced but I don't think he's exaggerating. My biggest issue was that BigCo's HR dept was the source of a lot of disruption and distraction for my people. Several of my top engineers complained about all the mandatory training sessions, compliance paperwork and online "learning modules" with nanny robo-quizzes. It was a lot.
The thing is, before being acquired we were in full compliance with all state and federal regs, yet somehow there was ~5x more HR burden at BigCo. And managers got all that plus an extra side of mandatory "managing people" training sessions and robo-quizzes. Then managers had to enter detailed quarterly evals and everyone had to participate in a pointless "360" peer review process that couldn't help feeling vaguely dystopian. And BigCo was proud to be the sector leader in employee satisfaction and retention. Everything was first-class, top-quadrant and 'industry best practice" yet my startup had substantially better satisfaction & retention numbers with an "HR Team" of 0.5 people and a tiny fraction the cost, time and cognitive burden on everyone.
I checked their careers page and see they operate in Europe. I’ve found it very common for American execs to be surprised and exasperated by the fact that there are actual worker protections there and they can’t just fire people on a whim.
Given the volume of the whisper network, I'm surprised it hasn't come out already.
- Recruiting - Onboarding - Payroll / Insurance - Culture development - Team building - Legal compliance - Offboarding
We (~120 employees) have worked with some massive conglomerates and retail enterprises too, and HR is wholly necessary for those formats. Where the line blurs between white collar and blue/brown collar collar is where HR becomes mandatory. For a purely white collar company? Absolutely useless and not worth it.
The people who do the list of tasks you described are literally the HR team.
Regardless of what you call that group of people; that’s your HR team.
You still have to do the same job, just now with team who is less qualified to do that. But if you guys are all happy about that, you do you.