[doug1001]

about 10 years ago i was assigned to a project to build some in-house HR software which required me to interact with quite a few on the HR Team (the dev team, both of us, even moved our desks into their area) for about four months.

aside from one or two benefits administrators, the rest were "HR generalists" and none of them had any discernible skills whatever. And lazy...not a single HR function that they hadn't outsourced. With almost no experience or skill requirement to limit the pool of applicants, the competition for HR jobs is clearly high and incumbents were terrified at doing anything which might jeopardize their job. As far as i could tell, this fear determined nearly all of their day-to-day interaction.