Yep. And Engineers often have pet projects. Marketing often has a slightly odd artistic vision for something.
People are gonna be people.
People are gonna be people.
Especially by HR, because unlike an engineering pet project that may waste some time, pet projects by HR can significantly impact the quality of life of every employee at the company, cause people not to join the company or quit the company, and so on.
Dysfunctional HR (which is almost all HR) is just about as bad as having a thieving dishonest CFO or a clueless visionless CEO, in terms of its impact on company prospects.
In comparison, a designer who does their work ever so slightly better than is actually going to have business value, or an engineer who puts 10% of their time into some project that they incorrectly think will help the company, or who chooses the 2nd best tool instead of the 1st best tool because the 2nd best one will look better on their resume, these are all much less significant to the company or to their coworkers.
Reminds me of the time I almost rage quit when HR's pet project was to implement a "baking roster" for the purposes of "team building".
Like... No effing way am I spending time baking shit just because you want a supply of freshly baked goods to eat? I'm a software engineer damnit.
Made my blood boil for sure.
There is the reason why some jobs are treated uniquely, and HR should be one of those jobs, as they have a disproportional amount of power and influence over other people's ability to find employment.
In some countries those special professions are even marked as such in law, for example in Poland there exist a notion of a "public trust profession": "a profession that is a profession of high social importance, requiring appropriate qualifications not only professional and health, but also characterological, i.e. moral and ethical"
I am not particularly keen to enshrine that notion in law, but we should not treat HR so flippantly.