5 ms·

Orthogonal nit, you tripped over one of my soapboxes: "employ a new resource". People are not resources, like a vein of coal. They are individual. Which was y

by pnathan 11y ago

Orthogonal nit, you tripped over one of my soapboxes: "employ a new resource". People are not resources, like a vein of coal. They are individual. Which was your point. But using the word "resource" instead of "person" perpetuates bad ideas.

chris_wot 11y ago
Agreed. My bad, in fact I acknowledge the irony, given my point (as you have picked up!) is you cannot treat contractors like a physical commodity! I appreciate you highlighting that discrepancy in my comment :-)
arethuza 11y ago
That's one of my own wee foibles - I never refer to a person as a "resource".
- chris_wot 11y ago
  That's less a foible and more a character strength :-) the foible is referring to someone as a mere "resource" (and yes, I am acknowledging my own foible here!).
devonkim 11y ago
When you deal primarily with people whose primary roles and careers have been driven entirely by Taylorist managerial principles (fundamentally, the belief that managers are the ones that know best and most efficient instruments to allocate workers and efforts instead of relying upon workers themselves) then you're somewhat forced to deal with the language of contracts where people are interchangeable with the term and it's a reality you have to just deal with if you do business with them. It's treating all your workers like you're playing Starcraft rather than trying to manage an elite Navy Seals team where each person is fully capable of independent actions and thoughts. Rather, most large companies are used to rather low quality labor and I might dare to say that some companies prefer their "go do something" labor as fairly narrow while their managers are showered with praise and glory constantly for the work of those they're managing. It's hard for a lot of people on here to imagine dealing with 100k+ other coworkers but at a point you oftentimes have to abstract away what makes people human to work in most large corporations. I'm not advocating that this is correct, but much like slavery and flat world theory, I hope this becomes outdated and struck out as both completely ineffective from a business standpoint as well as unconscionable.
- bpyne 11y ago
  Unfortunately I think we're still stuck in thinking of software development as being like assembling a product on a manufacturing line. Assembly lines reproduce a product model in volume. People forget that developing the model takes loads of time from designers and engineers. Software developers are the designer, engineer, and assembler all at once.
  - cbsmith 11y ago
    > Unfortunately I think we're still stuck in thinking of software development as being like assembling a product on a manufacturing line. Really? Seems like most people describe it these days as a craft. > Assembly lines reproduce a product model in volume. Right, and software development is the process of building the assembly line. > People forget that developing the model takes loads of time from designers and engineers. But they know design an assembly line for a new task takes loads of time from designers and engineers... > Software developers are the designer, engineer, and assembler all at once. You can break of that work if you are working on a project of sufficient scale.
    - serge2k 11y ago
      > Right, and software development is the process of building the assembly line It's more like the process for developing the prototype.
      - cbsmith 11y ago
        No, you prototype out the assembly line when you are working on it (actually not that different from how assembly lines are designed), though I guess in some cases you sell the assembly line itself, rather than the services it provides or the products it produces.
- strangetimes 11y ago
  > It's hard for a lot of people on here to imagine dealing with 100k+ other coworkers but at a point you oftentimes have to abstract away what makes people human to work in most large corporations. Working myself for a company of 150K+ employees, I can confirm this is totally true. I hate a lot of high-level business speak like "resources", but what I've come to realize is that one cannot think of 150K people as individuals. It's too much for the human mind. If you see this as an indictment of large corporations, I wouldn't blame you. Just realize it's a reality of operating inside them.
cbsmith 11y ago
People rail against this, but I think it profoundly misunderstands the semantics. Gas is a resource. Money is a resource. Gold is a resource. A person is a resource. Nonetheless, only one of them is going to help my car go farther if I stick it in my fuel tank. A resource isn't intrinsically a fungible commodity (when they are, we call them "commodities" ;-); often they are unique. The common trait of resources from a businesses perspective is that they are valuable to the business. Sure, I'd like to think I have more significance to this world as a person, but the day my employer doesn't see me as valuable is the day I start sending my resume around... The other way to look at it is that while employees are individuals, they all take a paycheck. So, on the cost side, employees are all just different sized paychecks. When you are looking to assign employees to a task, you absolutely think about which individuals could/should be dong what, but before that, there is a decision about how much in the way of paychecks, if any, you ought to burning on that work. That first decision has little to do with the individuals involved.
- dragonwriter 11y ago
  > Gas is a resource. Money is a resource. Gold is a resource. A person is a resource. A person is not a resource outside of contexts in which chattel slavery exists. Labor is a resource, of which persons -- laborers (whether independent contractors or employees) -- are contracted suppliers, not units. This dehumanizing confusion of supplier with the resource they supply seems to only happen with labor.
  - cbsmith 11y ago
    > This dehumanizing confusion of supplier with the resource they supply seems to only happen with labor. I have a hard time fathoming how it is dehumanizing to suggest that labour from one person is not the same as labour from another.
  - cbsmith 11y ago
    > A person is not a resource outside of contexts in which chattel slavery exists. Your reference to chattel inspired me. Consider the cow. Cows are resources. There are a ton of rules about what one can and cannot do with cows, but businesses still think of the "cow" as their resource, and "beef" and "milk" as some of the value they get from the resource. Now, to your point on slavery, the rules for what you can and cannot do to people are very different from cattle. Of course, slavery is pretty irrelevant to whether someone is considered fungible (owning people is horrible, but it doesn't change whether they are interchangeable or not). In practice resources are often suppliers and often the value the business extracts from them are provided under contract or at least a generalized regulatory framework. You are again confusing properties of certain kinds of resources with properties of resources in general. Labour is very much how you marshall your "people" resources. It's a far more impersonal window through which to view people's relationships with businesses. > Labor is a resource, of which persons -- laborers (whether independent contractors or employees) -- are contracted suppliers, not units. Check out the definition of a "resource". It's the asset you draw upon to accomplish something. Strictly speaking, the real "resource" is the employment or contract with the person, not the labour. However, thinking in those terms is terribly impersonal and not terribly useful for reasoning about a business (outside of legal disputes); in reality the person(s) under a contract correlate with suitability, outcomes, etc. a heck of a lot more than the contracts themselves. So what you really think in terms of are the people, not the contracts.
thothamon 11y ago
Good point. I hate that word "resource" as applied to people, but I say it all the time, because everyone else does -- not a conscious choice, just a bad habit.
- chris_wot 11y ago
  It's a remarkably hard one to break!

by pnathan 11y ago

chris_wot 11y ago

Agreed. My bad, in fact I acknowledge the irony, given my point (as you have picked up!) is you cannot treat contractors like a physical commodity! I appreciate you highlighting that discrepancy in my comment :-)

arethuza 11y ago

That's one of my own wee foibles - I never refer to a person as a "resource".

chris_wot 11y ago
That's less a foible and more a character strength :-) the foible is referring to someone as a mere "resource" (and yes, I am acknowledging my own foible here!).

devonkim 11y ago

When you deal primarily with people whose primary roles and careers have been driven entirely by Taylorist managerial principles (fundamentally, the belief that managers are the ones that know best and most efficient instruments to allocate workers and efforts instead of relying upon workers themselves) then you're somewhat forced to deal with the language of contracts where people are interchangeable with the term and it's a reality you have to just deal with if you do business with them. It's treating all your workers like you're playing Starcraft rather than trying to manage an elite Navy Seals team where each person is fully capable of independent actions and thoughts. Rather, most large companies are used to rather low quality labor and I might dare to say that some companies prefer their "go do something" labor as fairly narrow while their managers are showered with praise and glory constantly for the work of those they're managing. It's hard for a lot of people on here to imagine dealing with 100k+ other coworkers but at a point you oftentimes have to abstract away what makes people human to work in most large corporations. I'm not advocating that this is correct, but much like slavery and flat world theory, I hope this becomes outdated and struck out as both completely ineffective from a business standpoint as well as unconscionable.

bpyne 11y ago
Unfortunately I think we're still stuck in thinking of software development as being like assembling a product on a manufacturing line. Assembly lines reproduce a product model in volume. People forget that developing the model takes loads of time from designers and engineers. Software developers are the designer, engineer, and assembler all at once.
- cbsmith 11y ago
  > Unfortunately I think we're still stuck in thinking of software development as being like assembling a product on a manufacturing line. Really? Seems like most people describe it these days as a craft. > Assembly lines reproduce a product model in volume. Right, and software development is the process of building the assembly line. > People forget that developing the model takes loads of time from designers and engineers. But they know design an assembly line for a new task takes loads of time from designers and engineers... > Software developers are the designer, engineer, and assembler all at once. You can break of that work if you are working on a project of sufficient scale.
  - serge2k 11y ago
    > Right, and software development is the process of building the assembly line It's more like the process for developing the prototype.
    - cbsmith 11y ago
      No, you prototype out the assembly line when you are working on it (actually not that different from how assembly lines are designed), though I guess in some cases you sell the assembly line itself, rather than the services it provides or the products it produces.
strangetimes 11y ago
> It's hard for a lot of people on here to imagine dealing with 100k+ other coworkers but at a point you oftentimes have to abstract away what makes people human to work in most large corporations. Working myself for a company of 150K+ employees, I can confirm this is totally true. I hate a lot of high-level business speak like "resources", but what I've come to realize is that one cannot think of 150K people as individuals. It's too much for the human mind. If you see this as an indictment of large corporations, I wouldn't blame you. Just realize it's a reality of operating inside them.

cbsmith 11y ago

People rail against this, but I think it profoundly misunderstands the semantics. Gas is a resource. Money is a resource. Gold is a resource. A person is a resource. Nonetheless, only one of them is going to help my car go farther if I stick it in my fuel tank. A resource isn't intrinsically a fungible commodity (when they are, we call them "commodities" ;-); often they are unique. The common trait of resources from a businesses perspective is that they are valuable to the business. Sure, I'd like to think I have more significance to this world as a person, but the day my employer doesn't see me as valuable is the day I start sending my resume around... The other way to look at it is that while employees are individuals, they all take a paycheck. So, on the cost side, employees are all just different sized paychecks. When you are looking to assign employees to a task, you absolutely think about which individuals could/should be dong what, but before that, there is a decision about how much in the way of paychecks, if any, you ought to burning on that work. That first decision has little to do with the individuals involved.

dragonwriter 11y ago
> Gas is a resource. Money is a resource. Gold is a resource. A person is a resource. A person is not a resource outside of contexts in which chattel slavery exists. Labor is a resource, of which persons -- laborers (whether independent contractors or employees) -- are contracted suppliers, not units. This dehumanizing confusion of supplier with the resource they supply seems to only happen with labor.
- cbsmith 11y ago
  > This dehumanizing confusion of supplier with the resource they supply seems to only happen with labor. I have a hard time fathoming how it is dehumanizing to suggest that labour from one person is not the same as labour from another.
- cbsmith 11y ago
  > A person is not a resource outside of contexts in which chattel slavery exists. Your reference to chattel inspired me. Consider the cow. Cows are resources. There are a ton of rules about what one can and cannot do with cows, but businesses still think of the "cow" as their resource, and "beef" and "milk" as some of the value they get from the resource. Now, to your point on slavery, the rules for what you can and cannot do to people are very different from cattle. Of course, slavery is pretty irrelevant to whether someone is considered fungible (owning people is horrible, but it doesn't change whether they are interchangeable or not). In practice resources are often suppliers and often the value the business extracts from them are provided under contract or at least a generalized regulatory framework. You are again confusing properties of certain kinds of resources with properties of resources in general. Labour is very much how you marshall your "people" resources. It's a far more impersonal window through which to view people's relationships with businesses. > Labor is a resource, of which persons -- laborers (whether independent contractors or employees) -- are contracted suppliers, not units. Check out the definition of a "resource". It's the asset you draw upon to accomplish something. Strictly speaking, the real "resource" is the employment or contract with the person, not the labour. However, thinking in those terms is terribly impersonal and not terribly useful for reasoning about a business (outside of legal disputes); in reality the person(s) under a contract correlate with suitability, outcomes, etc. a heck of a lot more than the contracts themselves. So what you really think in terms of are the people, not the contracts.

thothamon 11y ago

Good point. I hate that word "resource" as applied to people, but I say it all the time, because everyone else does -- not a conscious choice, just a bad habit.

chris_wot 11y ago
It's a remarkably hard one to break!