Really enjoyed this piece and it highly resonates with my experience. I worked at startups that would implement every shiny tool, which meant we were rolling out new People tools every few months 🤯. Like you said there is some good HR tech out there, but many VCs and founders default to thinking that People problems can be solved like engineering problems with technical solution, where in reality it can only usually be solved by a human-centric process.
You're missing a ton of reasons why people do these kinds of startups. I did one. I spent plenty of time working in I/O psychology, have a patent for one of the worlds first web based EOS systems, in case you are worried about "random tech guy who thinks today he suddenly knows HR".
Here are some real reasons:
1.) We've used Workday - we know that Workday is a solution by HR, for HR, pretending to be something that the general category. Lots of people in big tech get forced to use Workday, and the immediate reaction is "this is godawful, a market that is clearly ill served by people who know what good software should look like". It has the same principal/agent problem a lot of software does, where the software reflects what the buyer cares about, not what the user does. Nobody should be surprised that the pitch for "workday but way less shitty" gets traction.
2.) The general HRIS market has a ton of products that profess to do everything, yet do nothing particularly well. Why do almost no HRIS systems understand the concept of team very well, outside of what can be fit into a simple hierarchy?
3.) HR is different by industry, often wildly so - the kind of HR systems you use in manufacturing with hourly employees is way different than one used to manage, say, a professional services workforce. Yet most solutions force you to pay for implementation in order to do industry tailoring, leading to an opening for industry specific HR systems to be relevant.
4.) People is a hard problem, and HR does not have a monopoly on that. In fact, lots of people who aren't HR end up doing HR like things in spreadsheets. HC allocation, team formation, skill matching, etc. So much of the day to day people things that engineering executives need to do are done this way that nobody should be surprised that founders emerge to solve those problems.
A sincere approach from a place of curiosity likely would work better for HR folks who want to understand why so many engineering execs get drawn to this. Calling this "oh, tech bros just want easy solutions to hard problems" is honestly a pretty dismissive take that ignores some pretty great work of startups that are really focused on solving hard problems - and in many cases, successfully doing so.
Really enjoyed this piece and it highly resonates with my experience. I worked at startups that would implement every shiny tool, which meant we were rolling out new People tools every few months 🤯. Like you said there is some good HR tech out there, but many VCs and founders default to thinking that People problems can be solved like engineering problems with technical solution, where in reality it can only usually be solved by a human-centric process.
You're missing a ton of reasons why people do these kinds of startups. I did one. I spent plenty of time working in I/O psychology, have a patent for one of the worlds first web based EOS systems, in case you are worried about "random tech guy who thinks today he suddenly knows HR".
Here are some real reasons:
1.) We've used Workday - we know that Workday is a solution by HR, for HR, pretending to be something that the general category. Lots of people in big tech get forced to use Workday, and the immediate reaction is "this is godawful, a market that is clearly ill served by people who know what good software should look like". It has the same principal/agent problem a lot of software does, where the software reflects what the buyer cares about, not what the user does. Nobody should be surprised that the pitch for "workday but way less shitty" gets traction.
2.) The general HRIS market has a ton of products that profess to do everything, yet do nothing particularly well. Why do almost no HRIS systems understand the concept of team very well, outside of what can be fit into a simple hierarchy?
3.) HR is different by industry, often wildly so - the kind of HR systems you use in manufacturing with hourly employees is way different than one used to manage, say, a professional services workforce. Yet most solutions force you to pay for implementation in order to do industry tailoring, leading to an opening for industry specific HR systems to be relevant.
4.) People is a hard problem, and HR does not have a monopoly on that. In fact, lots of people who aren't HR end up doing HR like things in spreadsheets. HC allocation, team formation, skill matching, etc. So much of the day to day people things that engineering executives need to do are done this way that nobody should be surprised that founders emerge to solve those problems.
A sincere approach from a place of curiosity likely would work better for HR folks who want to understand why so many engineering execs get drawn to this. Calling this "oh, tech bros just want easy solutions to hard problems" is honestly a pretty dismissive take that ignores some pretty great work of startups that are really focused on solving hard problems - and in many cases, successfully doing so.