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by cmorgan8506 2953 days ago
> Also, a note indicating whether or not managers refer to people as "resources"

This made me chuckle. It's a pretty accurate measure of a companies culture though.

5 comments

At my last job we had a rule: if someone (usually a new manager) called people "resources", we called them "overhead".

Ex. "I could get more people on my team if we had less overhead".

It helped that our lead Agile Coach was the main advocate of this particular approach.

It's a pet issue of mine. I feel very strongly that a "resource" is something like a backhoe, a stack of lumber, a pallet of widgets, a computer, a building, etc. A person is... well... a person, damnit.

Calling people "resources" and treating them as fungible, disposable, commodities is extremely dehumanizing and is emblematic of the typical corporate newspeak bullshit that some people use as a dodge to avoid facing the fact that their actions affect actual people.

I'm sure they are, so asking this question is useless... I won't believe the answer.
There's one level worse: Human Capital, as in Human Capital Management (HCM).
Places I have worked in the past preferred to say "meat in the seat"