You’re a firefighter claiming that all houses are on fire; the things you’re saying don’t really seem to have a balanced perspective, and it’s legitimate for someone to point that out.
I was fully on board with hating all the HR bullshit, because it fucked me over. Until, by surprise it helped me out a lot, not long ago ago.
I am an IT guy, and I am very good. For a long time I was a contractor, very worthy of being hired full time. But because of the asinine HR fear of bringing people on because of all the over head* Many companies just won’t hire directly except in case of emergency. Unless they came from the internship program. A 4 month summer interview was how pretty much everybody who was an employee, became an employee. Just the way HR decided it should be, so it was that way.
Well I ended up as tech lead on an XXmillion dollar project. It came to the attention of the VP sponsor of the project that there were no “employees” working on the damn thing, it was entirely staffed by contractors. There was no employee “shepherding” the project technical knowledge.
So this VP executively ordered that there must be one key project “knowledge holder” committed for the long term. So I was brought in for an interview to become hired as a employee, a very rare thing. Everybody warned me how bad they were going to low-ball me, since they did it to everyone.
That’s where the bullshit came up roses for me.Years of being yanked around as a contractor, paid off literally. They went through the list of deficiencies they use to cut the normal hires down. But wait…
Yes I do have 10 years on Java, yes I do have ten years on UNIX, ten years on Oracle too, 10 years years on PL/SQL, websphere, database administration,OO, shell scripting, team leading,and customer interaction, PVCS,DB2, Rational suite. Well yes, I do have certs in Java SE developer, and J2EE web developer, and Oracle 8,9i,10g, and 11g developer and administrator. Masters in CS? Yep one of those too. Industry experience, that’s only 2 years.
That worked out well, it is nice to fall into the hole their system is designed specifically never let anyone into 
The look on the guy’s face,as he gave me the offer the formula prescribed, was priceless.
That’s not what I was told, but I’ll take your word over theirs. And that was a really long time ago, so my memory might be a little faulty.
I don’t understand how your experience in beating the system that was trying to keep you out makes you appreciate the HR department as being a valuable asset to the company.
I never said they were valuable to the company, but it ended up being valuable to me.
This is the policy my company has. When they switched, they took the number of sick days and personal days that were allowed and added them to the vacation days you were already entitled to, which was pretty cool. So if I need a mental health day, I can just take one. Another cool thing at my job is that most of us can telecommute, so if you’re feeling a bit under the weather but you can work and you don’t want to trudge into the office, you can work at home. You don’t infect anyone else, and you don’t have to use PTO if you’re well enough to work.
PTO/vacation policies typically vary greatly by industry. My previous employer had a very generous PTO policy - because they employed a lot of highly valued professionals in a very competitive industry and needed to do so in order to attract and keep their employees. The same reason they provided a great medical plan and high salaries.
My current company is 85% hourly non-exempt, most of them barely over minimum wage. High turnover is expected. And therefore, the vacation policy is likewise spartan. It kind of sucks for those of us in corporate but apparently it’s just good enough to keep us here (which is any company’s goal - have a policy that is just good enough but not better than it has to be).
Fortunately, my company got rid of this policy, but for many years, the system was completely crazy. Typically, when hiring someone, we would receive resumes from HR, do some screening phone interviews, and then pick 2 or 3 candidates to come in for face-to-face interviews.
If we ended up hiring someone who was not a minority or a woman but we had phone interviewed at least one minority or woman, then we had to explain specifically to HR why that minority/woman candidate was not being hired. We had to submit this documentation before anyone could be formally hired.
The problem was that we had to do this with candidates who were phone interviewed and whom we had never met. We had to figure out OVER THE PHONE who was a minority or a woman, when we aren’t allowed to ask them. The women were pretty obvious in general, but the designation of someone being a minority of course devolved completely into stereotyping (“well, he SOUNDS African-American…”).
It took YEARS of complaining that the HR policy was encouraging racial stereotyping before that policy got dropped.