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Comment by andybak | Hacker News Reader

It's possible that you'd miss a theoretically possible "good company with a bad HR department" although one can argue that they wouldn't remain a good company for very long...

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True, but this is always why i like working for smaller companies, they generally aren't big enough to have HR departments so usually its a technical person doing the recruiting.

so usually its a technical person doing the recruiting

Which, of course, never goes wrong ;-)

(I shudder to think of some of the early hiring decisions I made as a techie... I sucked. Hiring is darn hard. Being technical doesn't magically make you good at it.)

I don't understand how such a company could be possible even in theory. Seems like an oxymoron to me.

Google is trying very hard to be this, for example in not hiring people without degrees.

It is my understanding that they stopped such practices years ago. There are several people around here who claim to work at Google without a degree.

I work for Google. My highest degree is a high school diploma.

I've known some folk who were approached to work for G who don't have degrees. So it doesn't seem to be a general rule.

I don't understand how such a company could be possible even in theory. Seems like an oxymoron to me.

It's company growth that causes it.

Once the overhead of managing the admin side of employees becomes sufficiently large centralisation is a common result.

Getting that up and running right is hard - especially since the hard bits are often outside of the skill set of the folk hiring the people to run that new department. Take too long to do get it right and a good company can go bad quite quickly.

My point is that a company with a bad HR department seems to me to be a "bad company" no matter how good the rest of it is.

Fair enough ;-)

Or a good team within a bad company.

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