Bolt CEO's dangerous logic for axing his entire HR Team

It's been a couple weeks since I last heard the news that the entire HR Team at Bolt was fired by CEO Ryan Breslow.

Now I'm not a fan of HR, and I like to warn people that mistaking HR as your friend is a mistake they should make only once, if at all. Hell, "nobody at work is your friend" is a good principle to have, and HR should probably head that list.

But anyone expecting me to join the pile-on and gloat about "HR finally getting a taste of their own medicine"? Sorry lads, I'm going to have to disappoint you today. This is a dodgy move at best.

What happened

Bolt was valued at around $11 billion in 2022 when Breslow stepped away, and lost up to 90% of its valuation by 2026. Breslow returned to make sweeping changes, starting with removing about 30% of staff, including the HR function.

Breslow was on record glibly saying the following.

"We had an HR team, right? And that HR team was creating problems that didn't exist. And those problems disappeared when I let them go."

Don't know about you, but this simultaneously caused me amusement and discomfort. It reminded me of a joke I used to make as a smoker.

"I've been smoking for years, but when I read about all the different toxins I've been inhaling into my body, I got so disturbed that I stopped reading."

Turn that racket off!

I mean, would you turn off the fire alarm just because it made a loud distracting sound every time there was a fire? Or remove the brakes on your car to make it incapable of slowing down?

Yes, that's the TeochewThunder equivalent of sticking your head in the sand.

Another disturbing idea

Breslow was also quoted as saying, sounding somewhat conciliatory.

"Those HR professionals have really important insights when you're in a peacetime at a larger company. But we're a remote company, it's not like - a lot of the potential issues that you would have in a workplace don't really exist because you're not in the same room as somebody."

Did our boy just say we don't really need HR if we're remote? Maybe not, but it sounded an awful lot like it. And in case that's the takeaway anyone gets from this, I'm going to shut it down right now.

HR problems don't exist only if people are in the same room together. Remote workers still have to get paid, appraised and onboarded. They still interact with other workers, even online. Company leadership may still, in their zeal, make errors in judgement they need to be warned about. And in certain cases, HR problems get more intense precisely because it's remote. Workplace bullying, for example. I've encountered wankers who became even bigger wankers simply because being remote meant they weren't in immediate danger of being bitch-slapped for talking shit taken to task for being impolite. Come now, we all know someone like that.

What did he just
say to me?!

The only way remote work lessens the need for HR would be if HR's only function was just to look pretty and ask how everyone's day was. And that's not how it works. Not even a little bit.

So no... HR does not become less relevant because the company structure is remote. Sometimes, in those cases, HR becomes more relevant.

The real danger

Let's give Breslow the benefit of the doubt. Let's say HR was really creating problems where there were none, or making issues out of non-issues. Mountains out of molehills. Playing office politics, or worse, identity politics. Overreaching like they were cosplaying Dhalsim in Street Fighter.

Maybe. And even then, saying "they made problems so I got rid of them, problem solved" is a dangerous path to go down.

The point is, what often looks like non-issues slowing things down unnecessarily, are actual problems that laypersons just aren't equipped to handle. And let me be clear; this is not about defending HR.

Not interested in
defending HR.

What if it was an entire team of software developers who were fired because business people started thinking that software devs and their trifling concerns were slowing shit down? We've got LLMs that can generate code now, so business people don't actually need techies to write code.

However, business people are not software engineers, and being able to produce code doesn't magically make them so. Business people have largely the same concerns as software developers - aesthetics, functionality, compliance, security, maintainability - but ask a business person and software developer to rank all these in order of importance, and their answers would look very different. Go ahead, ask business people what they'd do if you told them implementing unit tests would add another week to deployment time at minimum. I'm not saying that all business people would give you an answer that would have you internally questioning your life choices, but the fact is that business and tech people have very different priorities. That tends to introduce resistance into the decision-making process.

What if people started thinking that, armed with LLMs, they could just replace software engineers and get rid of that resistance? Y'all know it's a matter of time someone starts going down this road, if they haven't already. I've seen business people make apps using LLMs, with sometimes comical results. But let's not pretend that eventually replacing techies isn't on the cards.

Au Revoir, Bolt HR!

Still think the firing the entire HR team isn't a big deal? You're right, it's probably not. But the reasoning - that's something we need to look at.

Time for me to Bolt,
T___T