Corporate utopia
Octopus Energy is a UK start-up selling green energy. The company is valued at £1.4bn, has 1,200 employees and more than 1.9 million UK customers, and is expanding into into other countries. Most importantly, its CEO, Greg Jackson, has no interest in HR or IT departments.
Bloody hell, gissa job!
There is a tendency for large companies to "infantilise" their employees and "drown creative people in process and bureaucracy", says Jackson. HR and IT departments don't make employees happier or more productive in his experience, he says. So he doesn't have them.
Dougal Shaw, business reporter, BBC News
Mr Jackson is absolutely right. My experience of HR has rarely been more than ambivalent. And I honestly think that the annual performance appraisal that we have to go through at MegaCorpCH is just a worthless exercise to keep the catatonic shitheads in HR happy; a happiness that they richly don't deserve. The best people in HR leave to do something better with their careers and lives; what remains are the scrapings of the barrel. Those that can, do; those that can't, HR.
As for corporate IT, it's risk-adverse and stuck in the past; suffering from historical neglect, when senior leadership simply failed to grasp its importance in the future of business, and saw it only as a budgetary blackhole. It seems to be populated by sub-geeks* who still believe the no one gets fired for buying IBM
mantra, even though IBM's personal computing division was sold off to Lenovo—a bargain basement Chinese knock-off company—over fifteen years ago. And they still insist on traditional password complexity and change rules that are no longer considered to be best practice.
The symbiosis of MegaCorpCH's HR and IT has delivered Kronos, probably the nadir of time-management software. Ultimately, employees have to work with substandard hardware; substandard software; substandard infrastructure; and a ticket-based problem resolution system that makes banging your head against the keyboard seem positively efficient, if not cathartic.
As the CEO of Me Corp., I also have no HR, and I deal with my own IT. Unfortunately, Me Corp. doesn't pay the bills, so I'm stuck with MegaCorpCH's buttfuck-retarded HR and IT for now. Mondo sadness. (sad)
* This is not to disparage the low-paid external contractors who're brought in to do the real grunt work. Those poor saps are caught between a rock (corporate IT) and a hard place (dejected users). They have my sympathy.