Comment by hnthrowaway121

To me a direct HR person is much less trustworthy than a manager with whom you’ve established a good track record. The manager’s behavior is incentivized completely differently depending on the company - sometimes it’s legitimate to manage towards the employees success and sometimes lose them. As a manager I had a director say something similar, that we are often just stepping stone on somebody’s career.

Whereas HR is a risk mitigation function whose purpose is to minimize the company’s exposure to lawsuits, and I stay miles away from them unless it’s absolutely necessary to engage. They can do other things on top of that function that are very helpful, but they are not there to help.

There are a lot of fictions at work. Still we all have our own risk profiles, and if we are lucky we can afford the risk of an honest conversation with our boss. That’s not the same as pretending everybody is trustworthy, it’s making a bet based on the specific situation at hand.

If your advice is “young people be careful, managers, supervisors, and HR are not your friends”, I totally agree.