Comment by speeder | Hacker News Reader

Comment by speeder | Hacker News Reader

One time HR of a company I got fired from contacted me out of the blue, and sent me a coding test made in a extremely poorly formatted MS Word .doc (not even docx...)

I was kinda amazed at how bad it was.

So I sent an e-mail to the CEO, I still had his contact and when I worked there I had a lot of freedom to talk to him and whatnot and had his personal e-mail.

I explained in the e-mail his HR was attempting to recruit me back, and if he had changed his mind and wanted me back I would accept it, but if not, at least he should take a look at the quality of the .doc his HR created.

He e-mailed me back some days later, said my e-mail made him go and check what the HR department is doing, he found out they all are being incompetent, so he fired all of them and hired a new HR, he said he doesn't want me back, but thanked me for fixing his HR, and promised such unprofessional approach wouldn't happen again.

EDIT: for those thinking firing HR was too harsh, just some more context: they e-mailed me a .doc out of the blue, with bad questions and bad formatting, they didn't told me what job I "applied" for (and I didn't apply for a job in first place), they never said what the company wanted, or what the job was or anything, and they acted in a kinda arrogant manner, as if they were HR of a FAANG company, something like: "Oh, complete this document, and if you pass we will inform you when the next interview will take place, you have 36h to complete this." Also, somehow the .doc was the third inverview, somehow I passed the first two?

> he found out they all are being incompetent, so he fired all of them and hired a new HR

I get the feeling that this CEO isn't very good at CEO-ing. Presumably the solution if the next HR team doesn't work out is to fire them and keep trying?

A lot of managers and CEOs behave in this way. It is their privileged training ground. Of course it isn't effective if the environment is more to employee than employer like current situation. Once in a while they will hit a jackpot of star employee that is willing to be enslaved. If things turn sour, they can just jump to another company. As long as market and board of directors are incompetent like those HR, these kind of pricks will be able to survive. Their niche are there.

He's watched The Apprentice, how hard can it be?

All you need to do is yell and boss people around!

The biggest success for these people is if they spend so much time micromanaging one person, the rest of the employees can actually run the business without them interfering.

You know how some companies have a rapid process for re-imaging any PC that's not working properly, rather than trying to troubleshoot it? Same thing.

They could have sent you a consulting fee at least :-/

they all think they are FAANG.

It's a lot of leader/follower mentality. When you don't know what to do and can't make your own informed decision, you copy and mimick behaviors of others that are leading and successful. It happens in all facets of businesses. Most professional roles are highly risk averse and many roles can safely fall on "but Billy is doing it, and Billy is the best." When questioned about their choices, they can regurgitate the reasons Billy took the approach he/she did as a failsafe and ask of the person questioning the approach thinks they understand the situation better than Billy--all a sort of appeal to authority fallacy few pick up on. Smart leadership would at least look at the numbers and question why their business doesn't try something different than Billy because basic performance of that approach doesn't seem to be working too well for them and maybe something else would work better.

what is this explanation for? acting like FAANG is stupid, so don't do it.

Sometimes in order to realise one’s acting stupid it’s necessary to read explanations of why some other people are acting stupid. Chances are one might be experiencing some of the same feelings since we’re all human after all.

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