Posted on 05/22/2026 5:14:29 AM PDT by MayflowerMadam
After his company Bolt lost 97% of its value, Ryan Breslow gutted it, saying HR was “creating problems that didn’t exist.”
When Ryan Breslow’s fintech company Bolt lost $10.7 billion in value, he had a radical diagnosis: HR needed to go. “They were creating problems that didn’t exist,” Breslow, 31, said at Fortune’s Workforce Innovation Summit. “Those problems disappeared when I let them go.”
(Excerpt) Read more at entrepreneur.com ...
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“So what would you say . . . you do here?”
In my last company, I would throw in crooked, manipulative, possibly theft of training funds, blatant negligence of 401k and benefits management, and not held accountable in any way.
That HR director apparently moved on to bigger and better.
I would think the hiring manager or supervisor could better determine who would be a good fit or not. HR people may have no idea of the work environment in a department.
Exactly! Determining who is qualified or not is the hiring manager’s decision not HR.
I searched, but didn’t see it.
I worked for the DoD for 3 decades and even there I never heard of “unlimited PTO”.
Sounds like a recipe for disaster if you ask me.
I was in HR for about 20 years. 😵💫😱
“eliminated four-day workweeks and unlimited PTO.”
Must be the West coast.
“Determining who is qualified or not is the hiring manager’s decision not HR.”
That was my understanding where I worked.
HR compiled a list of most qualified candidates but turned it over to the hiring official(s).
At that point HRs job was dine.
Giddy that I have been retired for ten years this summer. Maybe I’ll get lucky again and die peacefully before the bastards that be figure out some new way to devil me or I run out of money.
Some form of HR is necessary because of so many labor laws you can run afoul of. I hired Admin I staff to handle compliance, payroll and such. They offered other functions but we took care of those ourselves.
I must confess to being barreled by the idea of unlimited PTO. what the hell?
I hate HR.
I was young when I realized how awful they are.
My best friend was in a position in the city where I worked. I don’t recall what happened, but was told that because of my seniority I could bump her. I said, “No way. She’s my friend and she has kids.”
HR Director kept encouraging me to bump Cindi; I kept refusing. He got angry. He said to think of my future. I told him that in my future I’ll at least be able to look at myself in the mirror.
It worked out in the end. She found out she was pregnant with her third and resigned to be a stay-at-home mom. I loved that job!
“...at Initechf?”
LOL! Love it any time an AWFL has her panties in a twist.
I chaired several search committees for librarians at the college that I worked for. We had a committee of three or four faculty members and two students. We worked with the librarian staff to write the job description and qualifications needed. We would usually receive 50-100 applications for each position. HR organized and sorted each application by date received. HR DID NOT determine who would be interviewed. Our committee did that-it was time consuming but each committee member reviewed each application. We narrowed our list to 20 and then to 10. The ten top candidates were interviewed via Zoom. We invited 3-4 candidates to campus for interviews and meetings. The committee then recommended to the Provost and President (who also met with each of those candidates) and made the final selection. They always agreed with the committee’s recommendation. Not to brag, but my committee did a pretty thorough job. We also make a list of questions to ask each candidate. The list was reviewed and approved by HR. HR never make a decision on whose application the committee reviewed-we reviewed them all.
I’m Alaska in the ‘80s the city where I worked was on a 4/10 schedule. It was great. Every Monday off.
That’s good. I’d always worked at big companies and HR always expanded far more than warranted. At one company the HR dept went from a staff of 2 to a staff of 15 in 4 years. Basically, the director and manager of the department did nothing at that point.
I always said that at the high-tech companies, the HR department, by nature, are the dumbest people in the building. But that has changed some because the DEI situation has caused companies to hire any manner of worthless box-checkers.
Oh, and I did work at a company up until 2023 that had “unlimited PTO.” They filed chapter 11 last year.
There's a lot more to it than that. There are like 22 languages spoken in India. You let one of them in HR and you get their homeboys from the same region, that speak the same language and are members of the same caste. At sometime in the future I see at least one Fortune 100 Company that's not paying attention getting blown up by a discrimination lawsuit over caste
And woe betide any company that has Indians and Pakistanis together in the same group.
Correct, but the number if languages is way more than 22. Probably closer to 122 and a couple of thousand dialects.
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