It starts…

To quote Dire Straits, “…then came the lawyers; then came the rules.”

I work for a (relatively) small company that runs a website. When I started about a year and a half ago, we were under 50 employees but were starting to grow quickly due to expansion of our sale team. Said team has grown quickly and, as a result, we’re now closing in on 150 people.

When I started, we had minimal management and the CEO had said that the day we got HR was the day he left. We now have HR and the CEO has stayed on. We’re also looking for a CFO and most of this is a prelude to the stated intention of going public “soon.”

The explosive growth has split the company into three buildings although that will be ending soon as we all will be moving our new home in a week or so. But they do expect the sales team to keep growing and they will, eventually, have to move to new digs again.

It is interesting to note that Engineering is split across two large spaces in the current building with the whole center section being devoted to Recruiting, HR and Marketing. That area is 100% XX chromosome and while I’ve had women in other departments complain about the lack of women developers, not a word has been said about the lack of men in Marketing or HR, for example. Shall we say I’m not at all surprised.

While I like the HR woman, what prompted this post was the email with the new Harassment and Sexual Harassment policy, complete with Important! priority. It seems pushing the company over 50 people triggers the legal requirement for a number of things including this policy and EEO compliance info in our hiring and job ads. There were lots of comments and semi-serious jokes about what we could no longer say “once we had HR.” Well, we now have HR and the rules are coming.