[fsckboy]

> And people should never be treated as merely tools.

maybe on a tight knit team people don't mind being treated like tools because they understand what needs to get done next, and see that it makes the most sense for them to do it, it's nothing personal.

At my freshman year "1st day" our university president gave us an inspirational speech in which he said "people say our program just trains machines... I want you do know we don't train machines. We educate them."

[chousuke]

I'd say that if you have a tight-knit team, you are already doing the very opposite of treating people as tools. There's nothing wrong with having a shared understanding of a goal and then assuming a specific role in the effort to accomplish that goal; people are very good at that.

The problem is when you think of people the same way you think of a hammer when you use it to hit nails: The hammer doesn't matter, only that the nail goes in.