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Comment by hundt | Hacker News Reader

I'm wondering, does anyone have any stories of involving HR in a situation like this (less-than-overt discrimination or harassment from a person more senior/important than you) and getting a positive outcome? At this point whenever I read that someone "reached out to HR to ask for help in navigating the situation" I assume that the main outcome will be to put the company on notice that they need to start working on their paper trail for when you inevitably quit or get fired. But I suppose I wouldn't hear the happy stories as often as the unhappy ones.

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I don't know of any cases where the aggrieved person reported something to HR and was helped, but I know of a few cases where a third party reported something to HR on the aggrieved person's behalf and it turned out well.

I personally witnessed a woman at work getting harassed, and she was too afraid to say anything. I reported to HR on her behalf as a witness and the harasser was quickly removed.

I think the best way to get HR to help you is to find an ally and make them aware of the wrongdoing so they can be a witness and then report it to HR for you. Then it's no longer just the word of the two people involved, and they are more compelled to act to remove the liability of the aggressor.

The same thing happened to me. I was a manager at the company, and an employee came to me saying he had witnessed harassment against someone else on his team. As a manager, after I heard that news, I literally had no choice in the matter - the only course of action was to directly report to HR (The HR team specifically put all managers, at all levels, through training saying they must report any known or suspected cases of harassment or else they put the company at grave liability risk).

While I think it's unfortunate that this is usually a more successful route, I agree with you that it's no longer a "he said-she said" case (or, in the case of the article, a "she said-she said"), and since HR also has to deal with people who do (even if rarely) use the complaint process as a weapon, coming off as a "reluctant witness" seems to help. Again, want to emphasize that it's unfortunate that is the case, but I also think that's human nature.

It's true that a third party report helps, but also, always make sure that you have the permission of the person you're reporting on behalf of.

Yes of course, I guess I assumed that was common sense, but you're right, it should be explicitly pointed out.

HR exists to protect the company, full stop. They are only interested in the workers insofar as they reveal potential legal liabilities for the company.

It is almost always better to first talk to outside legal representation to understand the landscape. If there are actual law violations, they will help properly document and possibly start preparing a case, and if not then you know you should prepare to leave the company.

EDIT: surprised at the downvotes here, this is common knowledge for workers in all industries, not just tech, and this has been discussed at length every time a similar issue arises.

> It is almost always better to first talk to outside legal representation to understand the landscape. If there are actual law violations, they will help properly document and possibly start preparing a case, and if not then you know you should prepare to leave the company.

Assuming you have already agreed to legally binding arbitration as is pretty much standard in all employee contracts (although thankfully a recent law banned this practice in California for employees hired in 2019 or later), how useful is it to go to a lawyer? It just seems like the system is designed to work against you.

I have never actually gone through the binding arbitration process, so my knowledge of this is very limited.

All you said is correct about arbitration. However, It never hurts to get independent legal advice. You never know like if the arbitration clause won't hold or if there are other aspects you're missing. Also, last but not least AFAIK you can and should always bring your own lawyer in arbitration.

In many states that permit binding arbitration agreements, whistleblower protections and criminal activity reports pierce the agreement. That's why the specific nature of the transgression is important, and why actually talking to a lawyer is better.

It is the reverse. The state must not "permit" so much as aggressively work around mandatory binding arbitration, as the judiciary viciously denies access to courts of law to victims of mandatory binding arbitration and invalidates state laws to protect their citizenry. The American Arbitration Act has been interpreted with maximal denial of the rule of law towards its victims.

> how useful is it to go to a lawyer?

If nothing else, an informed, independent perspective should be able to help you better understand your situation, or see/know to ask about factors which you might not.

> Assuming you have already agreed to legally binding arbitration as is pretty much standard in all employee contracts (although thankfully a recent law banned this practice in California for employees hired in 2019 or later), how useful is it to go to a lawyer? It just seems like the system is designed to work against you.

State laws trump agreements one makes with a company.

Yeah, that appears to be the "Hacker News wisdom" on this topic and it certainly seems plausible to me. I was just wondering if this is a basically universally held opinion, or if some people with relevant experience have a different view.

While that may be "HN Wisdom", when it comes to these sentences, "HR exists to protect the company, full stop. They are only interested in the workers insofar as they reveal potential legal liabilities for the company.", I usually see HN folk only think about the first sentence and forget about the second one.

That is, often times an employee and the company share a mutual interest because of the risk of liability, and it's good to understand this, because as an employee this can help you. As jedberg said in a comment above, this is one reason maybe while going to a third party (e.g. complaining to someone else, who then brings that to HR) can help. In that case, it's not so much "you vs. your adversary", but both the person reporting to HR and HR itself share the viewpoint of "If we don't stop this person he could get us sued."

> this has been discussed at length every time a similar issue arises

That's probably why it was downvoted. Repetition is tedious, and HN is for curiosity.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

With all due respect, discussions about legal matters should never be trivialized or considered "tedious".

HN is not a site for discussing legal matters per se, but only the ones that gratify intellectual curiosity, and only to the extent that they do. That is what we're optimizing for here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Yes, I have been in situations where I've reported harassing behavior to HR, directed at both myself and between other people, and gotten a positive outcome.

My first job out of college was for the U.S. Army on behalf of a large military contractor. My team leader worked for a different contractor. In the first few weeks he built up an insane environment of paranoia and micromanagement.

Our customer was a government employee. Twice in my first few months, my team leader came back from her desk yelling things like "YOU ARE SO STUPID" loud enough that everyone in the office could hear. I brought this up to a coworker, and he said that this happened periodically for as long as he had been there.

In retrospect, I should have immediately reported this. Since it was my first "big boy" job, I was feeling out how to deal with it. I figured since the government was our customer, one word from the person he was berating and he'd be ejected into the sun, or maybe everyone knew and this was just how things in this office worked?

Some time later, the micromanagement reached a crescendo. I completed a learning module for an instructor as per their specification and asked to do a demo. Team Lead responded saying no, the simulator was all screwed up and he was going to personally help fix it.

For 3 days in a row my team lead spent all 8 hours of the working day sitting in a chair behind me saying things like "move that box one pixel to the right.. no.. one more.. keep going" as he "felt out" the way the UX should be. I suggested that he could take the source from perforce make these changes from his desk. Nope, he didn't want to do that.

The work product delivered by 2 salaries over 3 days was marginal changes to UI element positioning, misaligning almost all of them in weird ways. I felt like I was going crazy, was he making my projects worse on purpose?

We had an excellent CHI engineer on the team. He had a masters degree in the field. He confirmed that nothing I was being asked to do made any sense at all. Nothing about this made sense.

I asked to take some time and talk to him about his management style. This was a mistake. He started out telling me that I was incompetent, and he needed to "show me how to be a good designer" and that he was going to continue micromanaging me for as long as needed to happen to accomplish this. After about 2 hours of back and forth, he seemed to at least understand that I needed him to back off. As we parted ways, his final thought was "You know what? You need to just shut up and do what you're told."

Yeah, no. I went to my desk immediately and sent an email to the site chief, detailing my experiences with him, and all the stuff he shouted at other people in the office. Despite my belief that everyone must have known what he was doing, that apparently wasn't the case. Government employee was too scared to stand up for herself, despite the fact she had the power to make him disappear instantly. Team Leader was escorted out of the building within 30 minutes and never came back.

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