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nicksbg

15 karma · joined October 6, 2020

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nicksbg··on I'm Eric Ries, author of "The Lean Startup" and new book "Incorruptible" – AMA
Aye, but fixing this also fixes operational cost and other long-term costs. There is no power without knowledge+experience especially in high level roles.

In the end, HR should extract the most value for the company, trying to combine interest of both employees/company into calculation. Sometime, the interest of an individual manager is not what is in the best interest of the company.

nicksbg··on I'm Eric Ries, author of "The Lean Startup" and new book "Incorruptible" – AMA
Thanks for reply Eric! I agree, and the problem is in the same way as with countries. Sure, you may have good leader and stability while the founder is alive - but once he goes, everything is ready to go up in flames.

The various gravitational forces within company eventually pull the company apart.

As you said, third way governance is really the key. At the end of the day founders in some cases should become chairman, to ensure that everything is functioning as set by constitution. Going into retirement and enjoying pension/stock options should be more common.

nicksbg··on I'm Eric Ries, author of "The Lean Startup" and new book "Incorruptible" – AMA
More or less unless you are considering Zuckerberg a cyborg. But jest aside, I was referring to a unique legal setup where he can not be forced out even if his decisions are catastrophically bad like whole thing with VR or good for shareholders.
nicksbg··on I'm Eric Ries, author of "The Lean Startup" and new book "Incorruptible" – AMA
I think that for example Zuckerberg has built a structure where he is basically irreplaceable. It had to do with A/B shares where, while having a lot less shares, he made sure to have the controlling ones.

While this is good while the founder is alive, it sort of begs the question how long will the company that has structure like that run after the founder is gone. I believe it could go to some family foundation that controls the company, but I guess that is still prone to corruption.

I think that there are a lot of interesting examples in gaming industry - founders start something and they are pushed from the company due to acquisition or by the shareholders. Let us not forget hostile takeovers too.

As for startups - I think that it depends a lot from where you come from. For example, being in Europe, Serbia, it is a lot harder to bootstrap startup or to find investors. The best bet is organizing startup as a C corp in Delaware via something like Stripe Atlas in order to get (hopefully) some foreign investors interested. Investors here want to extract value before there is one there, which is a short term thinking. This in turn lead to risk aversion, opening the country for outsourcing model which is now collapsing and where there is small percentage of product based companies.

nicksbg··on I'm Eric Ries, author of "The Lean Startup" and new book "Incorruptible" – AMA
When it comes to this I think that the main problem is with hiring practices of people opa. If you do not have people with education either in legal/economy psychology you are not getting good People Ops team. You need to have a maximum value team.

Also, an HR that has a right education can and will pushback against decisions that do not make sense such as removing employee that has essential know-how knowledge and that brings a value to the team.

The problem is that a lot of people in management do not want to hear feedback and only want to be surrounded by positive thinking and people that they can micromanage (even while the ship is sinking). Hiring people that do not have right education is basically a way to avoid any feedback and criticism, while having people that will do work that they are not really educated for, but happy because of the salary.

Another problem is gender disproportion in this field.

You can't expect a literature major in HRBP role to understand micro and macro organization of the business and how it is affected by various stuff.

nicksbg··on Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (March 2026)
Location: Serbia, Belgrade

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: Legal, HR, Management and Administration

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nikolastojic/

Resume/CV: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/k8qjnitad7hkktzcdvrfg/Nikola-...

email: nikolas(at)grindam.com

My experience is mainly focused on human resources, administration and legal work ranging from contracts, advice on case, paperwork, recruiting, and any other administrative and HR task. In general one of the differences from the others that are doing the same thing is that I somewhat technical background due to being involved in few different projects during the years, so I can easily communicate with developers and also see when there is an actual issue in production or if someone is just delaying something or bluffing during interview. I also having managing experience, as I have been managing director of recruitment agency.

For those that want to open local office in Serbia, I can also help with that task and setting up teams, legal framework and other stuff necessary for opening office on new location.

nicksbg··on Ask HN: Where to find VC fund or investor for project in Europe?
Thanks for the recommendation. London sounds interesting. I was focusing on Europe first to see if the situation changed from few years ago when it came to VC's and funding in general.

The only need for any kind of investors in this case is really due to scaling as time goes, both in regards to infrastructure and employees.

Truth be told, the Sales or Business Development in this case is something that is key in order to break the ice in terms of B2B so that it would get others potentially interested in trying it out and using it.

Believe me, as European, too much bureaucracy and administration is something that is killing industry here.

With that said, I am open to any financing outside of Europe that invests in European startups/companies.

nicksbg··on QNX Self-Hosted Developer Desktop
Tehnically, BB10 could run iOS apps at the beginning but, they disabled it before the release of PlayBook. Bad call.
nicksbg··on Proposal to Ban Ghost Jobs
The problem of the ghost jobs existing in first place is because of weak HR. HR that does not have education, can not be influential strategic personnel necessary to steward management toward right decisions. Ghost jobs are also an alternative to marketing since companies see it as a way to market themselves as successful company. Because there is no one to stop such foolish decisions, we see effect on market.
nicksbg··on Sunny days are warm: why LinkedIn rewards mediocrity
The posts section always basically goes like: We did X but then what surprised us with X is something we did not see coming.
nicksbg··on I gave the AI arms and legs then it rejected me
I think that old departments (personnel departments) should have been just modernized in reality. To be frank, in some cases a mix of HR/Legal department is cost saving too.

What it really comes to is that a lot of people love to micromanage everything. If you hire someone that has integrity and educational background in subject, he/she will warn you if the decision you are making will have consequences in the long run. If you have someone that does not have relevant education, that simply does not happen. The managers micromanage, those people receive salaries and if they step out of the line even when they are right, they are reminded that they do not have relevant knowledge in said department (law/economy). This in turn leads to a lot of people gaining something called shallow experience which then in turns leads those people to hire someone that des not pose the risk to their position further down the line.

The problem being in this case is that there are a lot of misses that happen when the HR is organized like that; from illegal hirings, not knowing key economic factors, not having a clue about the business itself, no clue about laws and procedures and so on. Which in turn does not really protect the company because the company loses both the money and employees.

nicksbg··on I gave the AI arms and legs then it rejected me
As someone that works in HR, the incompetent HR combined with using AI for ATS ( or not knowing how to use ATS at all) is one of the core problems when it comes to losing quality candidates and is to blame for this. It should be illegal to hire HR from any education other than law, psychology, management and economy background. That way the responsibility would be larger, the ROI on HR would be higher (because the retention of the candidates and the quality of the candidates). Simply paying and promoting people with any educational background in a HR role is a waste of money which also creates problem for the company and not just employees.
nicksbg··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (May 2025)
Any plans for Europe/Remote work roles?
nicksbg··on Company of One: Why Staying Small Is the Next Big Thing for Business
It really also depends on the country and lots of other factors.
nicksbg··on Are Immutable Linux Distros right for you?
Fair, but not strain in terms of storage space. More in terms of disk writes and how write intensive it could be, which can be a problem especially for SSDs.
nicksbg··on Are Immutable Linux Distros right for you?
Exactly. I think this is a massive problem, and also as someone that works on one of Ubuntu distributions, I always wonder how much strain it introduces together with flatpaks and snaps.
nicksbg··on Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (December 2024)
Location: Serbia, Belgrade Remote: Yes Willing to relocate: No Technologies: Legal, HR, Management and Administration LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nikolastojic/ Resume/CV: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/k8qjnitad7hkktzcdvrfg/Nikola-

email: nikolas(at)grindam.com

My experience is mainly focused on human resources, administration and legal work ranging from contracts, advice on case, paperwork, recruiting, and any other administrative and HR task. In general one of the differences from the others that are doing the same thing is that I somewhat technical background due to being involved in few different projects during the years, so I can easily communicate with developers and also see when there is an actual issue in production or if someone is just delaying something or bluffing during interview. I also having managing experience, as I have been managing director of recruitment agency.

nicksbg··on Something is rotten in the state of HR – Call for Action and Regulation
This article that I wrote yesterday, illustrates how the HR is barely functioning as a role, and how corrupted hiring has become, making in turn everything worse, for employee, employer and society.
nicksbg··on HR has mostly become useless – What's your opinion?
I would like to add that (and not since I come from law background) today the HR can be mostly automated for a lot of stuff as other said in this thread. Some processes such as personality tests can be outsourced to outside psychologist. I always like to add that having with knows ins and outs of business and legal, is far more beneficial for business. To be fair everyone will always calculate costs & benefits of each position, and at this point, HR as it is now is large expense.
nicksbg··on HR has mostly become useless – What's your opinion?
Exactly. Plus the external recruiter is dependent on the hiring performance. At the end of the day, the external recruiter does not have luxury to hire a bad candidate like a internal talent manager, since that can kill contract and possible future recommendations to other clients.
nicksbg··on HR has mostly become useless – What's your opinion?
Not quite. Would expand on it more but there are character limits on HN. My main point is that if you are coming from other field, you need to prove yourself - take the necessary education, some kind of courses, earn a certificate that proves you are willing to dedicate yourself to new career. Simply giving someone job that they do not how a good grasp on, is more of a favour than a logical business decision. It is better for them to get quickly on track via courses and education, as well the company that has chosen such candidate for HR.
nicksbg··on Ask HN: Are there some bad actors in Who is hiring?
The problem is, this became a behavior that is encouraged. Whether posting job ad is free or payed, a lot of companies do this to gain additional exposure, advertising themselves actually via job ad.

As an HR professional, I have seen this happening more and more. To add insult to the wound, most of those companies never respond to applications.

The whole point around it is that is cheaper to use job posting ad to advertise yourself than to pay real advertisement in form of banner or sponsored text ad. Most of those come minimum retention date, and are a lot more expensive.

nicksbg··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (April 2024)
Any HR/Ops roles open?
nicksbg··on AI hiring tools may be filtering out the best job applicants
Most of the HR people do not first think about the long term company plans when selecting candidates, legal stuff or anything else when it comes to hiring. Most of these problems are related to breaking the necessity for formal education, thus making this position open to kakistocracy and hurting the company in the long turn.

TLDR; The decision of managers in general to have HR from all forms of education, except from legal, has been the main reason for HR ineffectiveness, bias, discrimination and other problem among them prejudice that HR is on the side of the company. When you don't have knowledge, and you work in HR, you need to prove loyalty to the management and be executioner of a lot unpopular decisions, and obedient. They don't understand the legal background for a lot of stuff or managerial, especially when it comes to layoffs. So they only option is to either listen or get replace. And, this will stay the same, since any HR will not allow any HR candidate to get hired in the company that has more knowledge. Those that do not have the knowledge will fight tooth and nail to keep their job despite their lack of knowledge.

nicksbg··on Cloudflare employee posts layoff call with HR and goes viral [video]
HR in every country attracts people that do not have really qualifications in most cases to even work in HR.

Aside from that there is a visible gender discrimination in the sector towards men as well the education discrimination. When these two are combined, they act as gatekeepers, which makes the whole sector worse.

Less psychologist and more law and economy graduates was how it was before. For them the communication is the key aspect of their careers, so most of them have it under their thumb. No one really complained about old Personnel Departments and the info was there and they were actually knowledgeable about their job.

The education really can make difference sometime. As we can see, these two do not know how to handle situation, and are repeating the speech that most of the people probably already heard, without thinking.

Hell, I think that someone could make HR AI that would do the better job.

nicksbg··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (January 2024)
Any HR/Recruiter remote positions available?
nicksbg··on How to easily pay a single employee in another country
You could use something as a Employer of Record. Companies such as Oyster or Remote.com offer that along with payroll management. Plus, the employee is technically employee and not contractor, since the EoR takes all necessary steps to register your employee as such and pay all necessary taxes and social contributions.

The other way for him would be to setup legal entity so that you could work with him as contractor or Freelancer. In some countries, such as my own (Serbia), freelancers can be payed directly, without the need for them to setup any kind o f entity or register with EoR. You should check if something like that exists for your employee.

nicksbg··on Ask HN: How are C. managers selected when opening office in another country?
What I did notice however is that the pick can have a lot of influence on how the company will develop in country, especially in terms of overall "company culture".
nicksbg··on Ask HN: Anyone planning to open office in Serbia?
What do you mean? :)