“Fine. Here’s your stupid letter,” I said the next time we talked. “Can you please make the threatening emails go away? You’re scaring people.” “Yes. I’ll send it over to the tax team right away.”

You guys, I really love Gusto. It’s not the fanciest tool out there. And it’s not cutting-edge anymore. That damned pig has been marching for over a decade at this point. But they’re really, really good at what they do. In that way that competence is often invisible. Until you see how someone else does it. I helped a client migrate from ADP Run to Gusto this week. Run is like ADP’s sh!tty knock-off Gusto. (They don’t like it when you call it that. A miffed ADP manager once po

In this product, there’s more than one way to do everything. You can customize your dashboard layout to show whatever widgets you want in whatever layout you want. The sidebar menu is like a used book store. You have tabs at the top, tabs on the side, and nested menus to the right of that.

The idea was to take everything that people hate about services like CorpNet and make it a pleasant, supportive experience for people. We’d answer their questions in words that made sense. We'd support them as they entered their tax IDs into their payroll system. If they got alerts from payroll or letters in the mail, we’d translate them into action.

I recently helped with a migration off of a PEO. The client was frustrated with all the ways that the PEO was curtailing their decisions and all of the extra work it involved. “Extra work?” you ask. “But PEOs are supposed to save work.” That’s the myth.

Like you can just tap them on the shoulder and hand them the phone. “Excuse me, Mr. Zuckerberg. Can you please talk to this guy Doug in Minnesota?”

What would happen if you combined the gonzo journalism ethos to labor posters? What if someone went around posting rogue meal and rest break posters in Walmart bathrooms? What if you snuck into construction sites at night to plant lawn signs of OSHA Cares? What if you snuck into hotel laundry rooms to post minimum wage posters in Spanish?

People sometimes use the terms HR and People Ops interchangeably. But when they do differentiate, they put the wrong people in the wrong seats.

I can’t stand it when people insist on unnecessary steps. Especially if those unnecessary steps are self-defeating.